


The Long Winter

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6787945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When things fall apart, you just have to keep going. This is a post-season-four AU that was 95% written during the season four hiatus; then of course season five came along and jossed it thoroughly. Since so much of it was written, I decided to finish and post it. See notes inside - this isn't the happiest of stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally inspired by a spoiler I'd read that Neal would have a new handler in season five. I got to thinking about Neal interacting with a new, non-Peter handler, and 20K of post-finale fic ensued.
> 
> I was somewhat ambivalent about posting this, however, because it became abundantly obvious to me when I started editing it that I had been using this fic to work through personal bitterness about season four. It's a very bitter fic. However, I hated to just leave it languish since nearly all of it was done and it had an OC I really liked. You should know, though, that this is a story with an overall bleak tone that does NOT end happily for all characters. (However, I don't kill off any major characters, and no character relationships are irrevocably blown up. Feel free to ask me if there's anything specific you want to know before reading it.)

Five minutes after James walked out the door, Neal's phone rang.

He'd poured himself a drink, his hands shaking so hard he slopped wine on the countertop and floor, but hadn't touched the wine glass to his lips. If he started down that road he might never come back from it. Instead he just held it, until the ringtone of his phone made him jump, and the glass tumbled from his fingers to shatter on the floor.

"Caffrey," Diana said, her voice small and tinny in his ear. "You better be in your apartment."

"I am," Neal said. He stared at the pool of wine spreading through the glass shards at his feet. It was the same jewel-tone richness as fresh blood.

"Stay there. You're off the anklet, and Neal, if you walk out that door, there's nothing I can do for you."

"Okay." He hadn't been thinking about going anywhere. He didn't know what he was planning to do. His brain was white noise.

"I'm heading over to your place. Neal --" Diana took a deep breath. It sounded like she was going to say something, but broke it off and said, instead, "Turn on the TV."

By the time Diana arrived twenty minutes later, he'd been watching Peter's arrest on a dozen different channels, from a dozen angles. Diana walked in and scoured the room with her eyes: Neal perched stiffly on the edge of the couch, the papers on the table, the pool of wine still soaking into June's floor. Then she tossed him the anklet. "Put that on," she said shortly, and went to wet a handful of paper towels in the sink.

Neal locked it around his ankle, watched the green light blink on. 

"What the hell is wrong with you," Diana said. She was sitting beside him, with a wine-stained ball of paper towels crumpled up in her hand. He hadn't even noticed her sit down.

That, Neal thought, was the question of the day. "I don't know," he said.

"I don't --" Diana began, then broke off. "Neal, are you bleeding?"

"What?" It took him a moment to realize that she was staring at his hands. "No. It's wine."

"God," she muttered, and got up again. She came back with a washcloth, dampened with warm water, and cleaned the wine from his fingers and sleeves.

Neal sat and watched her do it. His hands seemed to belong to someone else.

"Neal," Diana said, and he raised his eyes to her face. Her hands were gentle on his, as gentle as her voice was tight. "You snap out of it. You fucking snap out of it right now. You, me, Jones -- we're what Peter has, okay? We're all he has right now. So you snap out of it and tell me what happened."

He told her everything, turning himself inside out, laying himself bare. The box, the plan he and Peter had concocted with the anklet. James.

"He was here, in your apartment?" She rose from the couch, swift and smooth. "Where did he go?"

"I don't know."

"Damn it, Neal!"

He rose along with her and flared back, anger cutting a swath through the white pillowy nothingness surrounding him: "I screwed up, okay? I _know_ that! You don't have to tell me! I know it and I want to fix it and I don't know _how!_ "

"Some things," Diana said tightly, through her teeth, "can't be fixed."

They stood feet apart, glaring at each other. The sound of the door opening broke the tableau. "Uh," Jones said, "okay, whoa. Diana?"

Diana spun around and threw the wine-stained washcloth across the room, a perfect rim shot into the sink. "Neal, come with me. We're going to find James. Clinton, see that pile of papers on the table?"

Jones's eyes went a little wide. "Is that --"

"Yeah. And we better hope there's something in there that'll help Peter."

She marched out the door. Neal had to trot to catch up. He fell into step behind her. She didn't look at him.

As they left June's door, a single red leaf spun down from the ornamental cherry tree beside her walk. Neal caught it automatically. It was the same color as the wine.

The air still held summer's warmth, but winter was coming.

 

***

 

They didn't find James.

The next two days were frantic days, days of almost no sleep, days of poring over papers until Neal's eyes ached and he vibrated from too much coffee. Diana and Jones had taken the box of papers to enter into evidence, but Mozzie had made copies -- Neal had absolutely no idea when he'd managed to do it, especially on the down-low, but that was Mozzie. He and Neal spread the papers out in the secret speakeasy room, since they never quite knew when Diana and Jones would be dropping by. 

Neal spent his nights with Mozzie and his days in the White Collar office, looking at the same papers spread out on a conference room table. He suspected that Diana and Jones were staying up all night just as he and Mozzie were: talking to informants, tracing every lead on James they could find, pursuing an endless series of dead ends. 

Of course, Mozzie could sleep during the day ...

Neal hadn't seen Peter since the arrest, and the one time he tried calling Elizabeth, the call went to voicemail. He felt as if he was going a hundred directions at once, and was isolated at the same time, cut off and adrift. No one would tell him anything about his future, and his life at the FBI had contracted to a small circle of activity in the White Collar office. 

At any other time in his life, this would have really scared him. His future was determined by the movement of chess pieces far outside his reach. Right now, though, he was mostly scared for Peter. No one had any solid leads on James. The evidence, as far as Neal could tell, was not looking good. Jones had mentioned that Peter, if convicted, might be looking at the federal death penalty. If looks could kill, Diana's glare would have dropped him in his tracks, and no more had been said about that, but Neal's thoughts kept circling around it, touching down, then slipping away.

Two days after Peter's arrest, Neal was called into Callaway's office.

Or possibly Hughes' office again; Neal wasn't sure. Hughes and Callaway were both there. He'd frankly had other things on his mind than worrying about what was going on in the echelons of power above his head. The last two days were a blur. No one had threatened to toss him in prison (so far) but Neal didn't think it was his imagination that there had been a general cooling in the way that the White Collar office related to him. Diana, although angry, seemed to be making a deliberate effort not to take it out on him, but he still felt as if he was on the outside of a glass wall, with everyone else inside. He told himself it was understandable, told himself it didn't hurt, that a permanent pain hadn't taken up residence deep under his breastbone.

Still, he tried to look attentive and polite and not at all like his thoughts were a thousand miles away. 

"Caffrey," Hughes said. He nodded to Callaway and made a peremptory motion at Neal. "With me."

They left the office and went down the hall that led back to the private conference rooms. Hughes stopped in the hallway and turned to face Neal. "I won't bother with pleasantries; I'll just get straight to business. You've probably been wondering about the terms of your work release, with Peter currently unable to continue in his role as your handler."

He seemed to be waiting for a response, so Neal nodded numbly. 

"Long story short, the FBI is keeping you, but you're being reassigned for now. You'll have a new handler, and you'll be working in Cyber Crimes. Don't argue," he added, raising his hand before Neal had the opportunity to do more than open his mouth. "I should probably put you back in prison, but I'm not going to do that. You've been a major asset to this department. Thing is, the higher-ups don't want you anywhere near this case, so while the storm is still raging over us, you're going to be a major asset to _another_ department."

Neal tried to find words. There weren't any. He'd guessed that he might be sent back to prison, or put on house arrest, or any of a dozen other possibilities; this, however, had never occurred to him. He tried to marshal arguments, but after forty-eight hours of going full speed, he had few reserves left to draw upon.

"Why Cyber Crimes?" he asked at last.

"They had an opening and thought they could use you. Frankly I think it's got a lot to do with the Powers That Be thinking you can't get into trouble there." Hughes' small smile betrayed what he thought of that, as he opened the door to a conference room and ushered Neal inside.

There was a woman Neal had never seen before sitting in one of the chairs, leafing through a blue binder; Neal couldn't help noticing that his own face was pinned to the outside. She wore a stern charcoal-gray blazer over a black sweater, but her hair was braided into a hundred little cornrows, gathered back into a bunch at the nape of her neck, with beads on all the tips. Although Neal could tell she was an agent -- everything else about her screamed "Fed" -- it was not a very FBI hairstyle at all. He thought he might be able to cope with her.

"Neal, this is Aiyana Scott. Your new handler."

The woman rose and held out a hand to Neal. He'd been able to tell she was big when she was sitting down, but she seemed much bigger standing up: not just tall -- she was noticeably taller than Peter -- but broad in the shoulders. She was one of the biggest women he'd ever seen. Then his brain took in those details, along with the squareness of her jaw, went _Oh_ , slid sideways for a moment and snapped back.

"Caffrey," she said, holding out a hand.

"Agent Scott."

They studied each other. Her sharp gaze reminded him a little of Peter, and he wondered what she was seeing. He made sure to shore up the edges of his glossy facade; this wouldn't be a good time for cracks to appear.

"You'll be reporting to Cyber Crimes in the morning, Caffrey," Hughes said, and turned to leave. The _dismissed_ was implicit.

"Yes, _sir,_ " Neal murmured. He looked at Agent Scott again, trying to read her. Another Kimberly Rice? It was hard to say.

"Well, I've heard a lot about you, Caffrey," Scott said. "From the look on your face, they just dumped this on you, no warning."

He hadn't realized it showed, and hastily polished things a bit, raised the wattage of his smile. "I'm sure it'll work out just fine," he said, mentally rehearsing his well-practiced latest escape plan. Not that he actually intended to run -- but he could be ready to do it in minutes if it became necessary.

"If it helps, they just dumped it on me, too." She raised the file. "I'm getting up to speed on your case."

"There are a few more boxes of files around here somewhere."

"So I understand." She rubbed her temple with a thumb. "What say we get out of here?"

She indicated that Neal should go before her, so he did. It was the end of the workday and the bullpen was sparsely populated. Jones had already left. Diana was finishing up some paperwork at her desk. The startling thought occurred to Neal that he might not see her again. Then he reminded himself that he was being ridiculous. It wasn't as if he was going to the Moon, or to a distant island, or to Sing Sing. He'd only be a few floors away.

Still, he tapped lightly on her desk. "Hey."

Diana looked at him over the top of a file folder. "Hey." She looked tired, worn down to the bone, like he felt. "I heard they busted you to Cyber Crimes."

Great, everyone knew except him. "I have a new keeper," Neal said, jerking his thumb at Scott.

Diana gave Scott a quick, assessing once-over. Whatever she saw, she seemed to like. "Lucky you," she said.

Scott shrugged. "That's me -- always lucky."

"Don't lose him," Diana said. "No matter how tempting it is. We expect him back undamaged."

Then she held out a hand, which Neal stared at until he realized that she expected him to shake it. So he did.

"I'll --" _Fix this,_ he started to say. But Diana was right. Some things, you couldn't. He tried to pretend Scott wasn't standing behind him, listening; tried to make it for Diana's ears only. "I'll make this right, Diana. I will. I promise."

"Don't make promises you may not be able to keep," Diana said, weariness pressing her voice down to a monotone. "Have fun in Cyber Crimes."

Neal was silent as they got into the elevator, toying with his hat because he needed something to do with his hands. Aiyana Scott leaned on the wall. "You want a lift home?" she asked him.

He started to refuse on principle, then decided that, no, he probably should take the opportunity to get to know her a little. She held his key now, and what little freedom he still possessed was in her hands. And he really needed free movement right now. "Okay."

Her car was nearly identical to Peter's. Was there some rule that civil servants had to drive newer-model Fords? Maybe it was a patriotic thing. Neal resisted the urge to fiddle with the radio. It probably wouldn't be good to get on her bad side so soon.

"So what do I call you? Agent Scott?"

"Aiyana is fine." She hesitated a moment, chewing her lip. The engine idled, but she hadn't pulled out yet. _Uh-oh,_ Neal thought; she was clearly working up to something. After a moment, she turned to him. "Neal, there's something we should probably get out of the way immediately."

Neal felt himself tensing, and forced the con-man mask to stay smooth and perfect. This was when the rules came out, when he found out whether he had another Rice on his hands, and just exactly what the next few days (weeks? months?) were going to be like until he got Peter back.

"I'm a trans woman," Scott said, and Neal's thoughts skipped like a record going over a scratch, because that was so completely _not_ the track he was expecting her to go down. "I'm out at work -- when you're my height and build, it's hard not to be," she added with a hint of ruefulness, and then went serious: deadly serious, pinning him with dark eyes. "I need to know if that's going to bother you, working with me. Because I'd like to know now, if so."

"No," Neal said automatically -- _when people have power over you, tell them what they want to hear_ , and besides, why should he? Then he hesitated himself, and returned his own honesty for hers. "At least, I don't think so. I'm not sure."

Aiyana Scott smiled. She was one of those people whose smile was beautiful, lighting up and transforming a rather plain face. "Honest. I can respect that, even from a con man."

"You should respect it _more_ from a con man," Neal said.

She nodded acknowledgment of this. "Fair enough. I should also tell you up front that I'm not going to be your go-to for information about my situation. I'm not going to answer stupid questions or intrusive questions, and I'd rather not answer any questions at all. You have the Internet and you know how to use it."

"No intrusive questions," Neal promised, crossing his heart.

 

***

 

Rather than letting him out at June's, Aiyana parked and got out herself. Neal found himself wary again, feeling trapped and cornered. "I can see myself upstairs."

"I know," Aiyana said. "I want to meet your landlady and introduce myself as your new handler."

He couldn't come up with a good argument why she shouldn't, but he made sure he was one pointedly bouncy step ahead of her when he opened the door.

June was reading in the back sitting room, in the window seat looking out over the garden. She looked up when they came in, and Neal was already working up an explanation when Aiyana beat him to it. "I'm Agent Aiyana Scott, Mrs. Ellington. I'm going to be working with Neal as his handler."

To her credit, June was her usual gracious self about having a new FBI agent dumped into her lap. She accepted Aiyana's hand like a queen receiving a visiting dignitary. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Agent Scott. I had expected something of this nature."

"I'm looking forward to working with Neal, and with you," Aiyana said. Although her voice was firm, she seemed a little off guard. Clearly she hadn't expected June to be, well, June.

Since June seemed to have the situation in hand, Neal ducked out of the mutual appreciation society and went upstairs to make sure there was nothing incriminating lying around. He was still tidying when there was a light tap at the door and June ushered Aiyana into the apartment. Aiyana was so tall that she ducked her head slightly going through the door -- not that she would have hit anything, but it was the instinctive reaction of a tall person who is used to hitting her head on things.

Aiyana looked around the apartment and whistled appreciatively. It was a reaction Neal had gotten used to, when law enforcement people saw the place for the first time: a little bit of awe mixed with that slight question mark of _And how do you afford this, exactly?_

Having her in his personal space felt just slightly like an invasion. He hadn't invited her, but he couldn't say no to having her here. Neal felt his walls going up, his gloss of surface charm getting glossier. "Nice place, huh?" he said, grinning and showing teeth. "Would you like a drink? Coffee? June makes _great_ coffee."

If Aiyana realized his hospitality was insincere, he couldn't tell. "No, I can't stay. I just wanted to take a look around. I like to be thorough," she added, and there was something about that statement, the way she inflected it, _something_ that was so Peterlike it felt like being punched in the stomach.

Neal just watched, saying nothing, as she made her goodbyes to June and promised to pick him up in the morning. June saw her downstairs. Neal poured himself a glass of wine, drank it slowly, and poured a second before he felt secure enough to reach under the couch cushions and brought out the maps of James's movements that he and Moz had been working on.

He recognized the cadence of June's steps on the stairs. The door had been left open, so she didn't knock. "Seems like a nice young lady. ... For a Fed."

"It's temporary," Neal said. "They moved me to Cyber Crimes, did I tell you?"

June settled herself on the couch beside him and accepted the wine glass he handed her. "Better than prison, I suppose."

"Marginally." Neal spread out the maps on the coffee table. "You don't have to help with this. It's not your fight."

"I like a good puzzle. The alternative would be spending the evening downstairs with a book, and I can do that anytime." She leaned forward, her head together with his. "Show me what you've got."

 

***

 

Aiyana picked him up on June's curb in the morning. Neal had made sure he was impeccably tailored and, he hoped, showed no sign at all that he'd been up half the night with June and later Mozzie, going over clues to James's whereabouts. He wasn't sure how long he could keep it up -- how long either of them could keep it up. Mozzie was already showing signs of drifting off to other projects; he _wanted_ to help, but they weren't getting anywhere and Mozzie wasn't a long-haul kind of guy.

As he got in, Aiyana said, "Ready for a long day tweaking the tails of cyber-crooks?"

"Actually," Neal said, "not so much, really."

Aiyana laughed. "I read your file -- well, some of it. This isn't really your skill set, is it?"

"Not so much. They're just trying to keep me off the street, park me somewhere they think I can't do any harm. You know that, right?"

"I know," she said. "For what it's worth, I think that for me, too, this assignment is a sort of -- well, not _punishment_ exactly, but I guess they decided to stick you with an agent whose career probably wouldn't be hurt too badly. Put the pariahs together and let them drag each other down." Her voice was bitter.

"I don't think working with me is _that_ bad," Neal said cautiously.

"Oh, really? Your previous handler is getting sent up the river for murder."

Neal's response was automatic. "He didn't do it."

"Doesn't change the facts."

Neal breathed out, and kept his slickest smile firmly in place. "What about you?" he asked, returning the dagger, point out. He didn't think he'd been misreading the subtle little clues when she talked about the job. "Or are you in Cyber Crimes because you want to be there?"

"I used to work in Organized Crime," Aiyana said after a moment. "I was good at it, too."

Her voice was distant, speculative, as if she was talking about someone else.

"When I came out and started transitioning, though -- I don't know, it wasn't like you could point your finger, but I wasn't getting nearly as many good assignments. Ruiz said I was too conspicuous for field work. Hell, maybe he's even right, but then I got transferred down to Cyber Crimes and no one was willing to say exactly why."

"What's it like?" Neal asked, and could have bit his tongue when she gave him a sharp look. "I meant working in Cyber Crimes."

"Depends on who you ask. They're a decent bunch, our co-workers. It's not what I wanted to do in the FBI, but ..." She shrugged. "I guess we don't always get what we want, do we?"

 

***

 

They got out on the fourteenth floor of the FBI building. Neal stood for just an instant after the doors opened, until he realized Aiyana was getting off, and then he took an extra-quick step to get off after her. He _knew_ Cyber Crimes was on Fourteen; it was just such a habit to keep going on up to Twenty-One.

"Earth to Caffrey," Aiyana said as he turned around to watch the doors close, as if they were snipping off a thread of his past. Firmly he pasted the mask on and followed her.

He'd been down here a couple of times, tagging along with Peter or Jones. White Collar's area of investigation often overlapped with Cyber Crimes, making it necessary for the two to work together. Unlike the open plan of the White Collar unit's floor -- which Peter had encouraged, saying something about open sharing of ideas -- Cyber Crimes was subdivided into dozens of little cubicles and server rooms. Aiyana navigated the maze effortlessly and went straight back into a room behind the main cubicle nest. Bathed in the blue glow of a dozen huge LCD flat-panel screens, two men, both of them younger than Neal, appeared to be having a rubber-band fight.

"Well, that makes a great impression on the new guy," Aiyana said.

They snapped to attention sheepishly and introduced themselves. Travis Lake was a skinny beanpole with a mop of reddish hair; the other, Dave Cudahy, was shorter and much neater, his dark hair gelled and combed in a 1950s style. Neal couldn't imagine two people who more thoroughly fit the word "geek". He had to remind himself that they were also FBI agents. Cudahy had a shoulder holster looped over the back of his chair, and Lake, for all his lanky nerdiness, moved like someone who could handle himself in a fight.

What they didn't do was take more than a cursory glance at Neal's anklet, or treat him any differently than a regular probie who'd just been dropped into their division. Neal had never quite realized, until trying to analyze his emotional reaction to their lack of interest, that he kind of _liked_ standing out, bathing in the audience's regard. It was a coping mechanism and an addiction at the same time. Their lack of regard was annoying, but soothing at the same time, in an odd way. He didn't have to explain anything. Presumably they'd been briefed on him, at least somewhat, but no one was scrambling to hide valuable objects as they showed him around. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that there _were_ no valuable objects here, at least to Neal's way of looking at it. Oh, sure, that rack of servers was probably worth ten grand or so, but what was that compared to a Monet?

Aiyana gave him a quick tour, showing him the bathrooms, the break room, the semi-secret stash of chocolate in one of the drawers, and the mini-fridge under Lake's desk. "We work in small, focused teams here," she explained. " _Our_ team specializes in cyber fraud. Travis is our cryptoanalyst and security expert. Dave handles network administration."

Oh God, Neal thought; I'm going to DIE. I will be dead of boredom before the week is out. "And you and me?" he asked, working on keeping the smile on his face.

"I'm a profiler," she said. "I did field work in Organized Crime, mostly, but I've trained for this too. And you are our expert on all things criminal."

"Hooray," Neal said.

"Just think, you could have been assigned to one of the cybersecurity task forces. Then you'd get to work on shoring up vulnerabilities in our nation's strategically critical network infrastructure."

Neal stared at her, unsure if she was joking or not. She sounded like she was reading off a brochure.

"I suspect they didn't want to give you access to any of the aforementioned infrastructure," she added.

"Like I'm interested in that sort of thing."

"Well, you'd better get interested," Aiyana said. She didn't say it in a cruel way, just a statement of fact. "This is going to be your life for the next year and a half."

It felt like being punched in the gut. "Peter's going to be cleared," Neal said, leaning close to her so that he could speak too low to be heard by the rest of the room. Not that they seemeed to be paying attention anyway; Cudahy and Lake were focused on the computer screens. "This is temporary. I mean, no offense to any of you, you all seem like great people, but this isn't what I got out of jail for."

Aiyana raised an eyebrow. Neal wished she wasn't so damn tall; he was by no means tiny himself, but it would have been nice to have the psychological advantage of a few extra inches of height. "Oh, you're the one who makes those decisions now?"

"It's not about me," Neal said, and was surprised to hear himself say it, even more surprised to realize that he really meant it. "It's about clearing Peter."

"Look, from all I've heard, Burke's a good guy. I'd like to see him cleared too. But this is life as it stands right now. So make the best of it."

"I'm not the kind of person who makes the best of things," Neal retorted. "I'm the kind of person who changes things until they _are_ the best."

"Well, good luck with that."

 

***

 

When the workday rolled to a slow, interminable finish, none of Neal's new co-workers bothered to say goodnight to him -- it wasn't _him_ , he gathered, so much as all of them being sunk too deep in documentation and code to even really notice that the workday had ended. The only exception was Aiyana, who told Neal he could go and asked if he wanted a ride home.

"I'm good," he said. "I like to walk. Clears my head."

"It's quite a walk."

"I can call a cab if I get tired. I usually see myself home when I'm working with Peter."

Aiyana had the grace not to say anything to that, just gave him a little wave. Outside the building, he looked back to check that she hadn't followed him, and then he turned his steps towards Brooklyn.

It wasn't really a conscious decision. He hadn't been to the Burkes' house since all of this started, and he wasn't even sure if Elizabeth would want to see him, but he needed the normalcy right now. If she wouldn't let him in, he could just sit on the doorstep for a while and then come home.

He walked through Manhattan as the sun went down behind the buildings. The warning beep from his anklet as he neared the Brooklyn Bridge caught him off guard. Doggedly he kept walking as the flashing light turned red, and not thirty seconds later his phone rang.

"Caffrey," Aiyana said. "If you don't want a pile of Marshals on top of you in a few minutes, I suggest you get back in your assigned radius."

"I have an exception to be here," Neal retorted, ignoring the clear evidence from his ankle that no, this time, he didn't.

"Burke's not your handler anymore, remember? There's no reason you'd need to be anywhere near his house and no justification I can offer for letting you be there." She sounded more sympathetic than angry, which in a way made it worse. "So get back in your two miles and maybe we can revisit this in the future."

The sheer unfairness of it took his breath away. By now he was used to being denied things -- it had happened on a daily basis ever since the day Peter had first put cuffs on his wrists -- but having a privilege and having it taken away, when he hadn't even _done_ anything, seemed like a heaping spoonful of cruelty on top of a very frustrating day. "Whose idea was this?" he asked, more anger slipping out than he'd intended. "Yours or the Marshals'?"

"It was a mutual decision. Come on back, Neal, or someone's going to come after you and there's not much I can do to stop it."

There was everything she could do to stop it; all she had to do was set his anklet to roam and tell them that it was a momentary glitch. Peter would have. Peter _had._

Of course, if Peter had been here, this wouldn't have been an issue in the first place.

And with that thought, the smooth mask he'd been maintaining in public, ever since Peter's arrest, cracked right down the middle. He strode back from the Brooklyn Bridge, and every step he took was longer, more furious.

He wasn't surprised when Aiyana pulled up alongside him in her car, but he kept walking. "Caffrey," she said through the rolled-down window. He took longer strides, until she pulled the car at an angle onto the sidewalk, blocking his path, and said, "Get in."

It seemed pointless to keep resisting, so he surrendered to inevitability, but he made sure to slam the passenger-side door as hard as possible after he got in. Aiyana glanced at him but didn't say anything. If this had been Peter, there would have been a lecture. Aiyana, though, remained quiet all the way up to Riverside Drive, which unnerved him while also giving him a chance to calm down a bit. He wondered if she was waiting for him to talk -- in which case, he didn't plan to give her the satisfaction. Or maybe she was just giving him space, which was something he wasn't really used to. Peter usually wanted to be _in_ his space.

As they neared June's, Aiyana finally broke the silence. "There's a lot of scrutiny on you right now, you know. They're going to be looking for an excuse."

"That's my business," Neal said.

"I know." She pulled over to the curb outside June's. "Listen, Neal ... I'm not Peter. I'm not trying to save you or turn your life around. I've read the terms of your work-release agreement and it's very lenient, so there aren't a whole lot of things I'm going to need to check up on. Just try not to make your problems my problems, and I don't see why we can't get along."

Neal eyed her warily, looking for a trap. "That seems ... very considerate of you."

"I'm not trying to be," Aiyana said. "This is a business arrangement. When you finish your sentence, I don't feel like it'll reflect badly on me if you rip off a convenience store two days later and get sent back to the pen. Just don't do anything to torpedo my career and get yourself kicked back to prison before then, okay?"

She held out a hand. Neal hesitated, then, somewhat reluctantly, shook it. He didn't _want_ to stop being angry at her, but it was hard. She really didn't seem bothered by it. His anger slid off her like water.

There was something kind of refreshing about having a handler who didn't view him as a fix-it project, who didn't take it personally every time he broke the law.

Except not having it made him acutely aware of how much he missed it. There had been times, especially early in his working relationship with Peter, when he would have given his left arm for a handler who just _left him alone._ Now he had it. _Be careful what you wish for,_ he thought, and realized he wasn't angry anymore, just deeply sad. He missed Peter so much that his bones ached.

"So, about that radius exception," he said, because he wouldn't be himself if he didn't try to push the boundaries a bit.

Aiyana gave him a look of disbelief and took her hand back. "See you tomorrow, Caffrey." 

"Tomorrow," he echoed, and he didn't slam the door this time.

 

***

 

Unexpectedly, Diana and Jones came to retrieve him for lunch the next day. Neal was pretending to look over ISP records from a server that was supposedly rerouting traffic to a second server bank in the Ukraine. He'd missed the explanation for why that was supposed to be important, but had a feeling that he wouldn't care anyway. He was having a hard time staying awake, and wished he'd had the foresight to bring some of his research on the Pratt case so that he could sleight-of-hand it into this boring morass and get some _actual_ work done. 

When Dave Cudahy called over that he had a visitor, the first thing Neal thought of was his own visits to Peter in The Cave. He tried to act cool and like he wasn't at all shocked to see them, but something warmed in his chest.

"So this is the darkest heart of Cyber Crimes," Diana said, peering around. "I've never been back in the inner warrens where the true geeks dwell."

"Hey, watch who you're calling a geek," Cudahy said lazily. "Who got their ass kicked at the last FBI interdepartmental volleyball game? Not us."

Diana flipped him off in a friendly way as Neal all but shoved them out the door.

"I thought about applying to work down here," Jones said as they got into the elevator. "Probably would have, if Peter hadn't recruited me for White Collar."

"You'd be dead now," Neal said. "You would have hanged yourself with your tie out of sheer boredom."

Diana and Jones shared an amused look. "That exciting, huh?" Diana said.

"Do you know what I spent this morning doing?" Neal asked. "Yeah, me neither, except that it involved lots and lots of tiny little numbers. I used to think bank fraud was boring and copyright infringement was FBI Siberia, but this is _horrible._ "

"Cruel and unusual, obviously," Jones said.

"Inhumane," Diana agreed. "Someone should complain to the Department of Corrections."

"Mocking my pain," Neal muttered, but he couldn't keep the grin off his face. Damn it, he'd missed this. He'd missed _them._

And they didn't seem to be treating him any differently, at least not that he could tell, aside from the occasional awkwardness of not having Peter around; it wasn't often that he'd had a chance to interact with Diana and Jones without Peter also being present. Still, there was a subtle tension between the three of them that hadn't been there before. Nothing was as it had been. Nothing, perhaps, would be again.

"How's the investigation going?" Neal asked, since it was starting to look like they weren't going to bring it up themselves. He didn't really want to ask; the fact that neither of them had said anything indicated to him that all was not going well.

They shared another glance, this one very tight. "Let's talk somewhere else," Diana said.

She didn't bring it up again until they were all sliding into booths at a small corner restaurant Jones had suggested. "We've been pulled off the case," Diana said quietly. "We've _all_ been pulled off the case. We're back to business as usual in White Collar."

"The conspiracy goes even higher," Neal murmured. It defied belief.

Diana shook her head, and Jones said, "Not unless you consider bureaucracy a conspiracy. Which some people might." 

"This never was our case," Diana put in. "Violent Crimes is handling it. The only reason why no one noticed us sooner was because of the organizational chaos following Peter's arrest." 

"We both knew this was going to happen," Jones took over. "We just didn't know how long we'd have. Well, now we do. We turned over all our files this morning."

"You're not going to stop," Neal protested.

"It's _Peter,_ " Diana said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did. "But we don't have much to work with here, Neal."

"The box. I gave you the box."

"Yes," Diana said, "the box. On which we don't have any sort of chain of evidence. As we've been reminded -- _frequently_ \-- everything in the box came to us through the hands of a known forger who has every reason to frame Pratt right now."

Neal stared at her. "They don't believe it's real?" For some reason the thought had never occurred to him. They'd searched so long and so diligently for the box, and he had allowed himself to believe that all the answers were there, and all the evidence they needed.

"Let's just say they're very skeptical. We're tearing down the reputation of a well-regarded public figure. No one wants to do that lightly."

Neal massaged his temples with his fingertips. A tension headache had taken up residence there, more or less permanently since Peter's arrest. He thought about saying that he didn't give a damn about Pratt's reputation, but knew he'd be preaching to the choir. "Even if we can't use the stuff in the evidence box, there's still the physical evidence."

"Which isn't helping us much so far," Jones said. He leaned back in his chair, sagging wearily. "There's powder residue on Peter's hands, and ballistics confirmed the gun he was holding was the one that killed Pratt. Yeah, he's got a story that explains it, and there are small inconsistencies in the physical evidence versus the official story, that we can pick at. But it's going to be a hard one to sell to a jury."

"Unless we find James."

"Unless we find James," Jones agreed.

There was a silence. A waiter brought their appetizers. "Have you talked to Peter?" Neal asked quietly, once the waiter was gone, and Diana gave a small nod. "How is he?"

"He's hanging in there." Diana took a deep breath. "They're denying bail --" She reached out and caught Neal's wrist as he started to rise in anger. "Because of the high-profile nature of the case," she went on as if there had been no interruption. "And because he has a close associate who is known for making very effective escape attempts."

Neal settled gloomily back into his chair. "No wonder Elizabeth's not returning my calls."

"I don't think she blames you," Diana said, though she sounded less than certain. "She's got a lot on her plate right now."

"As do we all," Jones put in, and the conversation rambled off into a discussion of the White Collar unit's latest case, an investigation into a Wall Street insider trader who had disappeared three years ago and resurfaced under a new name and identity -- still up to his old tricks, though.

"This guy's slippery, Caffrey," Diana said. "You could learn a few things."

"Please," Neal scoffed. "The fact that the FBI's onto him says to me that _he_ could stand to learn a few things." 

Although the temporarily light atmosphere was a relief, it also felt like a front. Neal could tell that they were all three struggling for normalcy. But for just a little while, it _was_ normal ... almost.

"Keep me posted, okay?" he said when they separated at the elevators.

"You too," Diana said, with a look that was a little too long. Clearly she was already suspicious of what he might be getting up to in the post-Peter era. Neal tried to look innocent, which made her look even more suspicious.

God help him, he'd even missed _that_ , too.

When he got back to Cyber Crimes, Aiyana waved him over -- not a finger point, just a peremptory sort of little wave. "Hey, Caffrey. I was planning to go see your former handler during visiting hours this afternoon, ask him a few questions. You want to tag along?"

"Sure," Neal said immediately, then wondered if he'd looked too eager, given too much away -- but he hadn't seen or spoken to Peter since ...

... since before the arrest, actually, and his happiness withered as he realized that he had no idea how Peter was going to react to seeing him.

 

***

 

It was interesting to be on the other side, visiting someone in prison rather than being visited himself. He had a feeling that being with Aiyana -- a person in authority, responsible for him -- kept the guards from being _too_ invasive in their search. On the other hand, Aiyana herself got some fairly unpleasant looks from some of the guards. No one was openly rude, but there were small slights. Things dropped so that she had to pick them up. Paperwork that took a little longer to process than Neal thought it probably should.

Neal found himself wanting to intervene on her behalf. Maybe it was just a stupid sense of chivalry, and he had a feeling she wouldn't appreciate it. Also, he had an even stronger feeling that it would make everything infinitely worse, upset the tentative sense of hierarchy that afforded the two of them even as much protection as they had.

Still, there was something about being back here that made the panic rise in his throat. When the door locked behind them, he had to remind himself, over and over, that it _would_ unlock, that he _would_ walk back out.

The crowd in the waiting area was mostly family members of the incarcerated, mostly women ranging from young to old, plus a few lawyer types. It was the kids that were hardest to look at: too young to really understand what was happening, clinging to their mothers and looking around with nervous eyes. Or, worse, they already looked jaded, at the age of four or five or six: just visiting Daddy in prison, like always, staring glumly at the flickering TV bolted to the wall and tuned to a talk show.

Neal tried a little casual sleight-of-hand with the nearest child to entertain her, caught Aiyana glaring at him and then cutting her eyes sideways at the guard, and desisted. Yeah, probably not a good idea to remind the prison guards that he could easily conceal small items about his person. The child's mother gave him a grateful smile, however.

Once they were permitted through to see Peter, there was an even more personal search, which prompted a disagreement among the guards as to whether Aiyana needed a male or a female guard to search her (completely ignoring her attempts to interject a preference). Neal was trying so hard to stay out of _that_ debate that he wasn't even sure how it was decided, except that they didn't search her in the same room where they examined him.

And then it was on into a small, bare, metal room, not exactly dirty but just sort of stained with years of ingrained grime and despair. Aiyana came out a few minutes later than Neal did, looking angry and closed-off. While Neal was still figuring out whether it would be better to say something or keep his mouth shut, the opposite door opened and Peter came in.

He looked ... like Peter, Neal thought, just tired and rumpled and very disconcertingly dressed in prison orange. Neal had played this out in his head a hundred times, but it threw him for a loop, actually _seeing_ Peter like that, in prison coveralls with a certain slump to his shoulders that was very un-Peterlike.

He wasn't sure whether to offer a hug or whether Peter would want a hug or, for that matter, whether hugs were allowed under visiting policy -- he thought the answer might be no. Besides, Aiyana had already stepped forward and held out a hand.

"Agent Scott," Peter said, and shook it. Either he knew her from the outside, or the FBI grapevine even operated in prison. Neal figured it was at least partly the latter; Diana and Jones had certainly been in touch.

"Agent Burke." She glanced at Neal. "I seem to have inherited your headache."

Peter's mouth twisted in something that might have been a smile, or maybe not. He sat down heavily at the table that Neal had never quite managed to get up from.

"Hi," Neal said cautiously.

"Hi."

Up close, Peter still looked like Peter, just tired and perhaps a bit annoyed, like Peter after pulling an all-nighter on a case. In particular, he wasn't bruised and he didn't seem to be moving stiffly, things Neal was specifically looking for.

"You're staring at me," Peter said.

"Sorry." Deliberately not staring, he found that he had nowhere to rest his eyes. "I _am_ sorry, you know," he said, looking at the wall and then at Aiyana's shoulder. It just burst out of him, completely spontaneous; he hadn't come in here meaning to apologize, exactly, but every time he looked at Peter in prison orange, he could feel the apology sawing at the inside of his skin, trying to come out.

"Neal," Peter sighed.

"I didn't mean to," Neal said. He should be more controlled in front of Aiyana and the guards, he really should, especially since loose talk in prison could literally cost lives -- he might be saying things that would end up torpedoing Peter's defense case. Or even incriminating both of them. But he couldn't help himself. It was the first chance he'd had to talk to Peter, and he wasn't sure how many more chances he'd get; he had no idea if Peter would ever agree to see him again, if he screwed this up. "I really didn't mean to, Peter, I swear I didn't know it was going to turn out like this --"

"Neal, stop," Peter said. "Really. _Please_ stop." That was a command, a definite command, and Neal snapped his mouth shut on the flow of words. Peter didn't sound angry, but he also didn't sound particularly sympathetic.

"Let's not rehash things, all right?" Peter went on. "Let's just move forward."

He really _was_ angry, Neal thought. Or disappointed. Or something. But Peter was keeping it ... not _hidden_ exactly (Peter had never been able to hide what he was feeling, not completely) but compressed, flattened, not letting it spill out. Not like when Elizabeth was taken, or when he'd accused Neal of taking the treasure (which still stung, even now, with half the treasure available to him). It was there in Peter's body language, a certain reticence -- not just because of the guards, Neal thought, but even beyond that, there was a little bit of a wall between them right now.

And he didn't know how to react to that. He really, truly didn't. The best thing he could guess at, the most positive thing, was that Peter was upset, or hurt, or something, and didn't think it was really Neal's fault, but was still working through it on his own. That was the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario was that Peter really _did_ think it was Neal's fault, and was sitting on anger that would cut him out of Neal's life like a knife blade.

There had to be words to mend this, but he didn't know them. For once in his life, words had failed him. 

And for some reason, it was his own unexpected incapacity that caused him to plunge into the sea of misery he'd been holding at bay. He didn't know what Peter was thinking or feeling; he had no words to fix the situation. All he could do was sit there.

He wasn't sure how much of all that Peter read on his face -- he thought he was hiding it pretty well, but Peter had always been preternaturally skilled at reading him. All Peter said, though, was: "How's the investigation going?"

Not a topic Neal wanted to talk about either, given how closely it was entwined with his current area of aching guilt. He wanted a safe topic, something completely unrelated to anything that had happened lately. Backyard barbecues. Cute kid stories. Some stupid thing that had happened on a sting. Except ... there _weren't_ any safe topics right now. Everything he'd done lately had revolved around recent events in some way, and besides, Peter was probably going out of his mind, stuck in jail with very little he could do to influence everything happening outside. 

So Neal talked about what he could talk about. He doubted if there was much that Peter didn't already know. Peter had probably talked to Diana and Jones, and Neal had to skirt around a lot of gray areas -- he'd called in some favors, and he didn't even want to know _what_ Mozzie was up to: ignorance was plausible deniability.

But the gist of it all was that they didn't know where James had gone. They didn't even know enough to guess where he'd be. Neal hadn't realized, until James had walked out of his life, how superficial their level of contact had been. Although he didn't mention this to Peter -- Peter knew, or thought he knew, more than enough about Neal's psychology already -- Neal had realized that just knowing where James was, in general terms, had _felt_ like having James in his life again. (Whether he wanted him there or not.) That was how Neal related to most people he knew. Mozzie was around, and Neal didn't have to see him every day or talk to him about what he was up to; he was still aware that Mozzie was somewhere in the general vicinity if Neal really needed to get in touch with him. And James had been the same way. He wasn't gone, and that felt like having him around.

Except when it really got down to it, what Neal had realized over the past few days was that his total interaction with James had been limited to a couple of conversations, none of which had strayed into deeply personal territory. He didn't know where James had been for the last thirty years; he had no idea if James had stayed in the safehouse that Mozzie had supplied. He didn't know what James did for fun, what his hobbies were, if he had any friends in the area. He just didn't have anything to work with. Diana and Jones were equally frustrated; since James had been using assumed names, there was no trail to follow back. Catching James was like catching smoke.

Even without the philosophical insights, it all added up to one thing: no one knew where James was or how to find him, and they didn't seem to be getting any closer.

Peter rubbed the bridge of his nose, a gesture he'd sometimes made when they were at the end of a long day of sifting through evidence and his eyes were starting to hurt. It was not just physical discomfort, but psychological exhaustion.

"You can use the library," Neal said. He couldn't help it, he found himself falling into the role of expert, wanting to give Peter all the little bits of advice that he'd picked up over four years. "They can stop you from doing a lot of things, but they can't stop you from looking up information on your case, even if it has to go through your lawyer. Talk to your lawyer; you can have things sent in --"

"You think I haven't been?" Peter asked, a little harshly, and there it was again, the sense of distance between them.

It _hurt_ ; it hurt because he wanted to fix it and couldn't, and because it really hadn't been his fault, not really, and he didn't think it was fair to hold him accountable for things James had done. If that was even what Peter was doing.

Aiyana cleared her throat. She'd remained silent through their conversation; she wasn't part of the off-book investigation into James, and on top of everything else Neal had had to self-censor even more carefully than if he were just talking to Peter. He'd already given Aiyana way more ammunition than he wanted to, regarding his leisure-hours activities, but there was no way around it. And while he hadn't forgotten that she was there, exactly, she'd been so quiet that for a little while it had almost been just him and Peter, briefing Peter on a case --

Except Peter's responses weren't right. Nothing was right. And neither of them had brought up Elizabeth, Neal realized.

"I know you two have a lot to catch up on," Aiyana said, "but before visiting time runs out, I need to have a talk with Agent Burke. Handler to handler."

This time, Neal's dismayed reaction must have shown on his face, because Peter grinned -- his first real smile since he'd come through the door, and the first time Neal had seen him look almost relaxed. "Calm down," he said. "You've got nothing to worry about ... unless you've done something to offend the lady already."

Neal was more worried about what _Peter_ would say. But the teasing was the first glimpse of normalcy since he'd come in -- the first moment that he'd thought maybe, just maybe, no matter what happened with James and the case, they weren't done; maybe they could get back to where they'd been, or something close to it.

"So I'm supposed to run the guard gauntlet all by myself?" Neal asked.

"What, I'm your den mother now?" Aiyana said, but then she raised her voice, pitched for the guard watching them: "He needs to leave now; I'm a federal agent, and I need to speak to this prisoner alone."

And so the decision was taken out of his hands once again; there was no more time, and Neal found that figuring out how to say goodbye to Peter wasn't any easier than saying hello. He tried sticking out his hand, only to have Peter look at it in surprise. Yeah, shaking hands was too formal; they'd never been formal with each other. Maybe he should've gone for a hug; maybe Peter would have appreciated it.

But he'd waited too long; Peter shook his hand anyway, and then held onto it. "Don't go off book, Neal," he said quietly. "I _mean_ it. Keep your head down and your nose clean; don't make waves."

Neal wondered how hard Peter had been trying to read between the lines, trying to fill in the details of Neal's after-hours search for James. "I'm not going to."

"You better not. Because the best you could do is end up in here with me. The worst is you could give them reason to believe we've been working together all along, that I've gone corrupt working with you, and make sure that I don't see sunshine again until I'm walking with a cane."

Neal took a deep, shaking breath. "I won't," he said tightly, and then, with more conviction, "I won't, Peter."

He glanced back once, before the door closed behind him, to see Peter and Aiyana in conversation. Neither of them were watching him go.

 

***

 

Neal found it a little startling to emerge into the slanting afternoon sunlight and realize that the workday was over. Cut off from the outside, the prison was its own world. It swallowed time.

There was a sharp undertone of coolness in the air, and the slanting sun had that particular clarity of autumn light. Neal turned up his collar. He hadn't been given instructions on where to go, and he was technically inside his radius. He could just walk home. 

Instead, he opted to wait with Aiyana's car -- leaning on it, since he couldn't get into it. (Well, he _could_ get into it ... but breaking into his new handler's car just so that he didn't have to stand in the sunshine for half an hour seemed like getting off on the wrong foot. Especially right outside a prison.)

Anyway, it gave him time to think over the conversation, to replay it in his head and think of a hundred little things he should have done and said differently. He oscillated between anger at Peter's insinuations and worry that he'd already stepped too far over the line; he bounced back and forth between nursing his own wounded heart and feeling scared out of his mind for Peter.

And, of course, the vitally important question: _What_ were Peter and Aiyana talking about? Well, no, he knew what they were talking about, at least in general terms. The question was what Peter was saying about him. They'd really been in there a long time, long enough for Peter to go over Neal's entire criminal history if he was so inclined. Would he do that? Surely at least _some_ of the things Neal had done with the FBI had outweighed his mistakes, hadn't they?

Finally Aiyana appeared. "Glad you're still here," she said, unlocking the car.

Neal slid gratefully inside. "Well, I thought about going on the run, but then I remembered I have a library book out, and I didn't want to deal with the fines."

Aiyana gave him a narrow-eyed, "are you kidding me" look. "I see what Peter meant," she said.

Great, now his two handlers were on a first-name basis; Neal wondered if that was a good or a bad sign for him. "What he meant about what? What did he say about me?"

"Confidential," Aiyana said as she pulled out into traffic.

Neal's stomach plummeted. That couldn't bode well. "It was bad, wasn't it?" Her face gave nothing away. "Look, I'd just like to point out that Peter has every reason to be angry at me right now -- every _justified_ reason, I might add, I'm not trying to duck responsibility here, but I'd also like to point out that I know he's given me some pretty favorable reviews in the past. It's an up and down kind of thing that Peter and I have, is what I guess I'm saying, and even if you caught him at a down time, that doesn't necessarily mean --"

"Neal, I'm not telling you what we talked about, and I'm not going to."

"I'm not fishing for information, really, I'm just trying to explain, because he might have said things about me that he wouldn't have said at any other time. Not that I'm saying they're _untrue_ things, exactly, but what you've got to understand about me and Peter --"

Aiyana sighed. "Neal, if I tell you one thing that he told me, will you stop bothering me about it?"

"Promise," Neal said. _Bothering_ , honestly. If he really wanted to bother her, she'd definitely know.

She drove for a moment without speaking; then she said, "It was the last thing he said to me before I had to go. He told me I'm responsible for you -- which I already knew, obviously, but he wished me luck."

That sounded very Peter. Neal could almost hear the way he'd say it: half sarcastic, half serious. He opened his mouth, not sure what he was going to say, but Aiyana was still talking.

"And then he told me that means I'm responsible if anything happens to you, and if something does happen, he won't care if he's still in prison, there'll be hell to pay."

Neal didn't have anything to say to that.

"Which is more or less what Berrigan said, too, I seem to recall. I don't know if you've conned the whole White Collar office or if there's something about you, Neal, that I haven't seen yet."

From someone else, it might have come out cruel; from her, it was more speculative. Curious.

"I'm special," Neal murmured. The flippancy was second nature, although he felt very un-special at the moment.

But he also felt a lot less torn up.


	2. Chapter 2

The season kept turning, fall colors emerging in the park and alongside the streets. Nature had no care for the small trials of human existence. The days were balmy, the nights sharp and cool.

And Sara called. She called on a weekend, mainly to chew Neal out for not telling her what was going on.

"I had to see it on the news. The news, Neal!"

She actually sounded close to tears. "I'm sorry," Neal said desperately. It seemed like he'd been saying that a lot lately.

"I'm not -- _angry_ , Neal, it's -- this damn ocean, you know?"

"I know," he said. He'd been at the table, poring once again over the copies of the papers from the box that the FBI didn't know he had. His back and neck ached.

"I could be on a plane tonight, if you need me there."

He _wanted_ her here, but it wasn't the same thing. "No, listen, you're starting a new job. A very prestigious new job. You can't drop everything and run halfway around the world. And even if you were here, I don't think you'd be able to help out much. We've already got plenty of hands and eyes. Of course," he added, "if I were dying, I'd say make an exception to the not leaving town thing."

She huffed a small laugh. "I'd definitely fly over if you were dying."

"Good to know."

"But, seriously, Neal -- is there anything I can do?"

"You can tell me about your life and give me something else to think about for a while."

"Okay," she said. "I can do that."

Neal poured a glass of wine -- it was ten in the morning, but what the hell -- and took it out onto the terrace. It was a cool gray day, with a bite of oncoming winter in the air, but as Sara talked about her new office and the appeal of a city three thousand miles outside his radius, it seemed to brighten, just a little.

 

***

 

Stress and lack of sleep took its toll, and Neal finally crashed. He slept through his alarm and woke to the sound of his phone, feeling like crap, with a splitting headache and a sore throat.

He considered going in anyway -- at the White Collar unit, he probably would have, until Peter inevitably made him go home. Then he thought about sitting in the Cyber Crimes server room, working on an infinite supply of infinitely boring cases while his throat ached and his nose dripped on expensive computer equipment. He called Aiyana back to let her know he was taking a sick day.

"Convicts on work release get sick days?" was her unsympathetic answer.

" _Peter_ let me have sick days."

"I'm not Peter. And I haven't seen any evidence that you're sick."

"What do you want me to do to prove it, cough on you?" Neal asked in disbelief. Somewhere deep down, he felt a small flash of hurt, which took him by surprise. He'd thought he was used to not being believed -- but actually that wasn't true: Peter often suspected him of stretching, bending and mutilating the truth, but he was unused to making an obviously true statement and being told it was a lie. Or, at any rate, it happened so rarely that he still felt the sting of it, like with the treasure outside Adler's warehouse that day.

"You lie for a living," Aiyana pointed out. "And this is something that even normal, law-abiding people lie about."

"Okay, fine," Neal said, hearing the petulant tone in his own voice. "I'll come in and make sure to cough on all of you and leave used tissues on every keyboard. I'll also have a chat with my lawyer about humane treatment of prisoners. See you shortly."

"Oh, good _grief_. Look, take the morning, and I'll swing by at lunch to see if you're feeling better. How about that?"

"You mean check up on me," Neal said, unwilling to accept the olive branch.

"Well, yes," Aiyana said, unrepentant. "I'll also be checking your anklet data, and it had better stay at June's all morning. See you in a few hours."

Suddenly a day off seemed a lot less appealing. He was tempted to come in just to prove he was right. But that would involve getting dressed and presenting a polished face to the world -- and, just, no. He didn't have it in him.

At least he knew she was going to stop by, which meant that he was sprawled on the couch reading a nice non-incriminating Dashiel Hammett novel from June's bookshelves, with anything of even remote interest to the FBI hidden, when the door opened after a cursory knock.

"Come in," Neal said. The sarcasm he was going for was lost in a coughing fit.

"All right, you do look sick," Aiyana conceded. She set a plastic grocery bag on the coffee table, which clunked. 

Neal peeked inside and saw some cans of chicken soup, ginger ale, a bottle of Dayquil, and a box of Kleenex. "Thanks," he said, with a certain amount of not-entirely-pleased surprise. He didn't _want_ her to be nice to him. He wanted this to be a business arrangement, like she'd said it was, and then he could go back to working with Peter once Peter got out.

"Don't let it go to your head," Aiyana said. She peered around the apartment and took a long look at the half-finished sketch on the easel. "That's good."

"Haven't you heard?" Neal asked. "It's what I do."

"I thought art _forgery_ was what you did."

"The skills are the same," Neal said, slightly stung.

The charcoal sketch was of the view through the glass doors to the terrace: the gargoyles, the parapet, the tops of the buildings beyond. Neal intended it to be a study for a new painting. He just hadn't gotten past the study stage yet.

James had asked him why he didn't do original work. In the heat of the moment, he'd shot back an answer. But over the past few days, as he'd struggled to make sense out of the chaos James had left behind, he'd found that his usual form of stress relief had deserted him. Normally, when he wanted to unwind, he'd slap a canvas on the easel and copy something. It was relaxing and fun. Or, at least ... it had always been in the past.

He'd tried five different times -- five paintings, from five different schools, Dutch Masters to Cubism -- and each time he'd ended up with nothing but a few brush strokes on a white canvas. He couldn't do it without hearing James in his head, seeing James's face.

So he'd tried something new. It wasn't as if he'd never done anything original, and in particular, he did rough studies from life as often as possible, to keep his skills sharp. But this -- he had no idea what it was going to look like when it was finished. He didn't even know what style it would come out in. Photorealism, a la Edward Hopper? Loose, impressionistic brushstrokes? Normally he studied a painting before he painted it, until he could see the whole thing in his mind's eye, every brushstroke and detail. This felt like leaping into deep water in darkness, with no idea what was at the bottom.

It was frightening. He hadn't made it farther than the earliest of the preliminary sketches. It would be easier to go back to copying -- but then James's words flashed through his mind. James's congratulations when his forged sculpture had been accepted as the real thing. His own pleasure in James's pride. _I don't want to be that person anymore,_ he would tell himself, and make a few more charcoal strokes on the sketch.

It wasn't like he never planned to copy another painting. But right now, it was too raw. He wanted to do something different. To _be_ something different.

This was something he hadn't even talked about with Mozzie yet, though Mozzie was too perceptive not to have noticed the shift. He certainly didn't plan to discuss it with a stranger from the FBI.

Fortunately, she let it drop; instead she looked out onto the terrace. It was raining lightly, suiting Neal's mood. Water dripped off the gargoyles, and Neal found himself wondering how he could represent it in charcoal, in paint.

This was one thing he'd already noticed that was different. Before, he'd gone around looking for things to copy; now he went around looking for things to paint, or wondering how he'd paint what he saw -- how he'd render that cloud, that particular quality of light. Being an artist really did make you see the world a little differently. He'd never realized that before.

"One thing that's kind of unclear in your files is how you ended up living in a place like this," Aiyana said.

"Just lucky, I guess," Neal said.

"I thought you didn't believe in luck."

Startled, he ran his mind back, tried to remember when he'd ever said that to her. She must have noticed his confusion. "You said you don't believe in luck, you make your own."

"I don't think that's quite what I said." He remembered the conversation now, his first day in Cyber Crimes. "I think what I said was that I don't make the best of things, I make things the best."

"Isn't it the same thing?"

"No." He sat up and pushed the book aside. He wished his throat wasn't so hoarse, because he could feel his mind sharpening and focusing on the conversation. He'd always loved having this kind of discussion with Mozzie, with Peter, with anyone who'd take the bait and throw interesting rebuttals back at him. "There's an element of chance to everything. No one can deny it. Con artists know that better than anyone. We work with that element of chance for a living."

Now she was smiling slightly. "And is chance the same thing as luck?"

"Not quite, but they're two halves of the same thing. You can't have one without the other. And people want to feel like they can manipulate it, because no one likes feeling out of control of their fate. Scratch the surface of anyone in a profession with a big element of high-stakes chance and you'll find a superstitious person underneath." He had to stop and take a sip of one of the ginger ales she'd brought him; he could feel himself starting to verge on a coughing fit.

"Criminals?" Aiyana said.

"And feds and cops," he tossed back. "How many agents have you worked with who had their lucky socks or a rabbit's foot on their keychain or a ritual they went through before an op?" She smiled, acknowledging the point. "Doctors too. Admitting to the randomness of chance means admitting that some of the outcome is out of our hands. People don't like doing that."

This time he did have to stop and cough. Aiyana pulled out a chair and sat, leaning an elbow on the table. "Do _you_ believe it's completely random?" she asked. "That nothing we do affects the outcome of our fate?"

"I never said _nothing_ affects it, did I? Lots of things do. Chance might _look_ completely random, but it's really made up of a combination of all the little decisions leading up to the big decision."

"So we _can_ actually manipulate it," Aiyana said, lacing her fingers together on the edge of the table.

"Sort of. The thing is, there's always some element of the outcome that's not under your control. We call that chance. You don't know which way the dice are going to fall when someone else throws them. You can work to manipulate the mark's actions, but you don't know for certain what she's going to decide. You don't know whether the criminal is going to stand, run, or pull the trigger when you take out your gun. You don't even know what the weather is going to do."

While he soothed his throat with a few more sips of ginger ale, Aiyana said, "So you're saying chance isn't _chance_ , exactly -- it's the aggregate of other people's decisions, and the random stuff that's out of everyone's control, like whether there's a storm that day."

Neal nodded. "Exactly."

"So where does luck come into it?"

He shrugged. "That's what people call it when chance goes their way. And you _can_ make your own luck, up to a point. I didn't know June would walk into the thrift store that day I met her. But once she did, I could have ignored her, I could have been rude to her. I didn't do either of those things, and I ended up here."

"You conned her?" Aiyana asked. It was hard to tell if she was asking as an FBI agent or just a curious bystander.

"I was polite and charming and she made the decision all on her own to give a room to this nice young man she'd met in the thrift store." Neal shrugged again, with casualness he didn't quite feel. "And three years later, she's had plenty of time to get to know me, and here I am, still living here. Is that a con?"

"Making your own luck," Aiyana said. "Not merely making the best of things, but making things the best."

"More or less. Luck is still a factor, though. Chance."

"So it's more like, change the things you can change, and don't worry about the rest?"

"And always carry your lucky rabbit's foot," Neal said.

"Do you have one?"

He just smiled at her.

"Well," Aiyana said, pushing off from the chair, "this has been a very interesting conversation -- that's not sarcastic, it really was -- but I should be getting back to work. Do you want me to swing by again tonight? Bring you anything?"

"No, it's --" _Out of your way_ , he'd started to say, but of course he was thinking of Peter, in Brooklyn. He had no idea where Aiyana lived. "-- not necessary," he finished smoothly. "I'll order in, or have June's cook make something."

"Must be nice," Aiyana said. "Having a cook. Luck, right?"

"And making the best of things," Neal said. "It's sort of entwined."

The look she gave him was, again, very disturbingly reminiscent of the ones Peter would always give him when Peter couldn't _quite_ figure out where one of Neal's comments fell on the "serious to joking to outright lying" scale. Then she was out the door and gone.

After a few minutes, Neal worked up the energy to get off the couch. He still felt lousy, but he also felt ... inspired, maybe, in a way that he hadn't been in awhile.

He kept looking at the dripping water on the terrace, thinking about it in terms of luminosity and reflectivity and value. He retrieved a sketchpad and a box of charcoal, put on a sweater, and opened one of the glass doors. Cool, damp air blew across him. He could have tried drawing it through the glass, but he wanted a more intense communion with his subject. For a while he just sat and drew, losing himself in the scritch of chalk on paper, the smell of the rain, and the sound of traffic on the wet street below.

 

***

 

He was back to work in a couple of days, still using the odd Kleenex or two, but no longer coughing his brains out.

He didn't exactly have a desk in Cyber Crimes, more like a corner of one of the worktables that they'd cleaned off to set up a computer for him (and he'd put his Socrates bust there, to make it feel more homey). Someone had placed a get-well card on his computer keyboard. It was just a cheap, impersonal card with a bouquet of flowers on it, but the team -- he didn't think of them as _his_ team; he wondered if he ever would -- had signed it. Aiyana was undoubtedly responsible.

"Thanks," he said, setting it beside the monitor. Dave Cudahy, the only one of them who wasn't thoroughly engrossed in something, gave him an absent smile.

He really ought to do more to make nice with his new co-workers. The trouble was, he'd been thinking of this assignment as very temporary. It took energy to play a cheerful, social role, and he really wasn't feeling it. But they were closing on two weeks now, and ...

... and this really might be -- not _permanent_ , not that (at worst, another year) but it might be long enough that it was worth trying to make allies.

If they ever _did_ get out in the field, it was worth it to make sure that the people who would be watching his back had an incentive to do so.

So he started making more of an effort. He was, after all, good at people. People were his main skill. He made conversation. He bought coffee for the group. He learned that Dave was engaged to a girl who lived in Far Rockaway (they mostly saw each other on weekends) and Travis lived with an elderly mother for whom he was the main caretaker. Aiyana was still something of a mystery, but then, Aiyana didn't talk much about her personal life at work. 

The Cyber Crimes unit had a habit of going out on Friday evenings for drinks -- not just his immediate team, but an ever-changing group usually composed of fifteen or twenty people. They invited Neal along. His first instinct was to suspect that he'd die of boredom (he could only imagine that it would consist largely of geeks talking shop, and he was right) but he also did have fun. Sort of. It wasn't the company so much as the company he _wasn't_ in -- he still missed White Collar, missed Diana and Jones and the probies, missed Peter like something in his soul had been ripped out.

But they were okay people ... for feds. Actually, aside from the "Big Brother will save us!" attitude that he'd come to expect from law enforcement agents even when they _weren't_ at work, the average Cyber Crimes agent seemed to be a lot more civilian-like than the people he was used to being around in the White Collar unit. They technically carried guns and took the mandatory firing-range training, but Neal suspected few of them had ever drawn their weapon on duty.

It was like working in an office, basically. It was kind of dull, but at least he was in very little danger of getting shot at, unlike working with Peter's group. And now that he was starting to get up to speed on the basics of the technology they were working with, he was starting to be able to uncover the challenge in the work. There _were_ puzzles to solve and interesting mysteries to ferret out. You just had to dig for them.

Given the choice, he'd rather be back in White Collar in a heartbeat. But he thought he could do this. For however long he had to.

 

***

 

He finally worked up the nerve to go see Peter on a Saturday. Going during the work week would mean asking Aiyana for a half-day off, and while he thought she probably would grant it, he couldn't quite bring himself to ask -- because she might say _no_ , and the fact that she had that power, that _anyone_ had that power, still galled him. 

Somehow he hadn't minded as much when it was Peter. It had still been frustrating, but, just ... not like that.

So he went down on a Saturday morning, walking in the crisp autumn air while the city was barely stirring. Visitors were not being admitted yet, so a few people were lounging around outside, leaning on walls or smoking cigarettes.

Standing by herself, a little off from the others, with her arms wrapped around her shoulders, was Elizabeth.

Neal stopped. She hadn't seen him. He backed off, retreated around the corner before she looked his way.

He hadn't thought ... but of _course_ she was probably coming to see Peter as often as she could. It was inevitable that their paths would cross sooner or later.

And they really did need to talk. In fact, they were going to have to talk eventually. They couldn't avoid each other forever -- if that was even what they'd been doing. It would be easier if he could have gone down to Brooklyn to see her. But calling on the phone seemed too impersonal, and emailing was even worse, which meant that he was reduced to waiting for her to get in touch ... which she hadn't seemed inclined to do.

They were going to have to talk. But standing outside the jail where Peter was awaiting trial did not seem like the place to do it.

Neal started walking back uptown. He'd gone a couple of blocks before he slowed and stopped. Running, or prudently cutting his losses? He wasn't sure if he knew the difference between them. It would probably make more sense to duck Elizabeth until the Peter situation was resolved one way or another.

But still he found himself turning around and walking back.

Elizabeth saw him coming, this time. It was all he could do to relax and walk naturally, and he wasn't quite sure he pulled it off. She watched him come, her face hard to read.

"Hi," he said, when he was close enough.

"Hi."

He examined her, as he'd examined Peter during his previous visit, but, as then, he wasn't sure what he was looking for. Signs of difference from how she usually was, perhaps. She looked tired; Neal could relate. She was holding a package clutched against her chest.

"For Peter," she explained when Neal looked at it.

"Oh." He hadn't thought to bring anything. That suddenly seemed like a huge oversight. Though he wasn't sure what to bring -- he knew all too well the sort of things _he'd_ appreciated in prison, but what might Peter like? Sports magazines? Crossword books? Too late now.

"I, uh ..." She paused, looking at the ground, the walls -- anywhere but at him. "It's -- been awhile, I guess."

"Yeah," Neal agreed, not sure what else to say.

"I guess you're here to see Peter?"

He nodded.

"Oh," she said. "I suppose it was a silly question. Of course you are." She drew a deep breath.

_This was a mistake,_ Neal thought. Tension shivered in the air between them, nothing so simple and straightforward as anger, but a snarled mess of uncertainty and guilt and blame, on both sides. "I can come back later, when you're not here, if you want."

"No," she said quickly. "No, no, that's stupid, I don't have a monopoly on Peter's time or anything. And you've come all the way down. It's just, I don't know, Neal -- it's just, I just, I don't --"

She covered her eyes with one hand, still clutching the package with the other. Neal froze for an instant and then, when her shoulders shuddered, he moved by instinct, putting his arms around her. She sank against him as if the strings holding her up had been cut. She didn't cry hard, and she didn't cry long, but when she pulled back she was smiling shakily and Neal found that his eyes were wet, too.

"I've been awful to you, I think," Elizabeth said, sniffling and wiping at her face, smearing mascara around. "I'm so sorry, Neal." She looked at the black stains on her hand. "Oh no," she said, and looked as if she might burst into tears again.

"Here," Neal said quickly, offering her his pocket square. "No, you --" It was instinct, the protest that rose to his lips, and he had to stop, back off and think about it. "Yeah, maybe a little," he conceded. "But I can understand why."

He was afraid of making her angry, but instead she just laughed a little, and carefully cleaned up her face with the pocket square. Neal pointed out some places she'd missed. Then she turned her face up to Neal's for inspection. "How do I look?"

Her eyes were red and puffy, the lashes light and sparse with most of their makeup stripped off. "You look great," Neal said, and it was one of the most honest things he'd said. "Peter is going to be so happy to see you."

"Us," she said firmly, and just then the door opened a crack and people started lining up. Elizabeth took his hand, and drew him into line with her. "He'll be happy to see _us._ "

 

***

 

Peter actually looked startled, mostly, when he entered the visiting room and saw the two of them waiting for him. It was clear, though he didn't say anything, that he'd only been expecting El.

And Neal realized, too late, that he was intruding on their very rare couple time. "I can leave," he said quickly. "If you want me to."

Peter shook his head, snapping out of it. "No," he said, and then, fervently, "God, no. Please stay."

It took a few minutes for them to find the rhythm, or to think of anything to talk about. At first there were awkward silences, or they'd start to talk over each other and then stop.

But then Elizabeth started telling a funny story about one of her clients, and Neal responded with a couple of anecdotes illustrating the extreme dullness of life in Cyber Crimes, and he felt himself relaxing for what felt like the first time in weeks.

"They need to give you a hamster wheel," Peter told him. "Keep you busy."

"Thanks, Peter, I'll be sure and mention it in the next meeting."

It was just so -- so _normal_. Neal found that he could even ignore the concrete walls and the guard observing them, the ever-present sense of claustrophobia that had settled on him as soon as he'd stepped inside. All he had to do was focus on Peter's grin and Elizabeth's laughter.

When their time was up, they all rose and the Burkes fell against each other. Elizabeth buried herself in Peter's arms, her face in his chest. Neal felt like an intruder, like he was seeing something too personal for outside eyes, and he turned his eyes away, suddenly angry at the guard for watching them -- especially when the guard cleared his throat and made a purposeful move in their direction. 

They broke apart, Elizabeth wiping her eyes. Then Peter wrapped a fast arm around Neal's shoulders and pulled him in for a quick, hard hug. Neal was too surprised to react.

"Come back," Peter said, letting him go with a gentle, almost playful shove.

"I will," Neal promised, meaning it.

Elizabeth didn't speak until they were outside. She seemed to be working herself up to something. Finally she said, "If you want to -- I don't know, come down for a little while ... I made some cookies last night. More than I could give Peter in his care package."

Wistfulness snaked through Neal's core. He missed sitting on the Burkes' couch. Missed Satchmo. Missed all of it. "I'd like to. I can't, though." He nodded toward the anklet.

Elizabeth frowned. "Our house is --"

"Not any more."

"Oh." Her face cleared. "I -- I didn't realize that."

Of course, she wouldn't have had any way to know. He wondered if she thought he'd been avoiding her. Well, radius aside, she wasn't entirely wrong. "You could come back to June's," he offered.

"I ... shouldn't. I have a lot to do this afternoon."

Neal tried not to look disappointed. Or crestfallen, as the case may be. "Yeah, that's fine, I'm sure you do."

They hesitated, awkward with each other again. Then Elizabeth said, "But -- later, maybe? I could bring some of those cookies."

"That would be nice." He smiled at her, and it seemed that he could feel some of the ice thawing, the warmth growing between them again. "I'd like that."


	3. Chapter 3

The trees lost their leaves in showers of gold coins, cascading down on rain-washed streets, leaving their branches bare against gray winter skies. And a break in Peter's case finally came, but it wasn't the one they were hoping for.

By now Neal was pretty sure he was the only one still trying to figure out how to get Peter out of a murder rap, aside from the actual investigative team officially assigned to the case (and he had his doubts about them). Mozzie, while he clearly wanted to help, had gotten bored and frustrated with the lack of progress and drifted back to his own life; Neal really couldn't blame him. June had only ever been helping as a favor to him anyway. Diana and Jones he didn't know about; they'd had lunch a couple of times, but had stuck to safe topics, chatting about work and teasing Diana about the probie down in the tech lab that she claimed she didn't have a crush on.

Even Neal was starting to drift away from it. There just wasn't much else to try. He was having regular phone calls with Sara now, every weekend and sometimes late at night when he was still up and she hadn't gone to work yet, and they discussed it without getting anywhere. He'd emailed copies of the papers to her, probably creating another crack in Peter's case if anyone ever found out about it -- but at this point, Neal was terribly afraid that Peter was going down.

And if he did go down, he might be looking at the death penalty for killing a U.S. Senator. It was something Neal tried hard not to think about.

But in other ways, life went on. There was no alternative, really. He'd learned that long ago. When things fall apart, you just keep going on. For a long time, he'd dealt with upheaval and change and heartbreak by running away and starting over somewhere else. He'd always thought it would be different if you stayed in one place and faced up to the consequences of your actions, but he was starting to realize that it wasn't, really. It just made the moving-on part harder and slower.

But then he looked up from a Cyber Crimes case file and saw Diana standing in the doorway with a hard set to her face, and he knew something had happened that he wasn't going to like.

Aiyana looked up too, saw Diana, saw that she was looking at Neal, and jerked her head towards the door. She didn't say anything, but she looked sympathetic.

So Neal rose and left the room, falling into step with Diana. In the elevator, Diana chose the ground floor. There was a case file tucked under her arm. As the elevator descended, she followed Neal's gaze to it.

"I'm probably not supposed to take this out of the building," she said. "But I'd rather talk to you outside."

Well, that wasn't good.

They stepped out into a gorgeous, sunny day, sharp and clear with air that cut like a knife blade. Diana said nothing until after they'd walked down the street to a coffee shop that had a few outdoor tables. One of the tables was occupied by a businessman reading a newspaper; he'd clearly finished his lunch some time ago and was enjoying the sun before heading back to the office. Diana stood over him, blocking the light and glowering down at him, until he decided that he had somewhere else to be. Then she annexed the table and left Neal at it while she went and got drinks. She took the file folder with her.

He stayed at the table mostly because Diana was really starting to scare him. "Diana, come on," Neal said when she got back, his voice dangerously close to pleading. "Just _tell_ me."

She still remembered how he liked his coffee (cream, no sugar). After sipping from her own cup, she pushed the folder across the table to him, but kept her hand on top of it so that he couldn't open it.

"Neal, they found James," she said, and his heart tripped over. "It wasn't the FBI. I have a friend on the Jersey City PD who knows that I have feelers out, and called me about this." She raised her eyes to Neal's face. "He's dead, Neal."

Her face had lost its dark edge and become -- soft, somehow, in a way that Diana rarely was. She expected him to be broken up about it, he realized. In truth, he wasn't sure what he felt.

"Can I see that?" he asked. His voice sounded strange.

"What's in here isn't pretty."

"I know."

Diana took her hand off the folder.

Neal flipped it open. There was a morgue photo of James inside -- he'd expected that, but it was still a punch in the gut to see it. From the look of things, James had been beaten badly before he died. There was also a coroner's file (James was listed as a John Doe) and an incident report.

"Two weeks ago?" Neal asked, reading the date.

Diana nodded. She had both hands curled around the coffee cup as if to draw warmth from it. "My friend thinks he got on the bad side of some faction of the mob over there. Maybe it was another branch of the Flynns. Maybe he just ran up gambling debts. We might never know; the case isn't a high priority for them, just another transient who got in bed with the wrong people. He had a fake ID on him, but they ID'd the body through dental records, and when the results came in, my friend called me."

Neal looked back down at the file, at James's still face. He couldn't help looking for traces of himself in James's features, as he'd done off and on since he learned of James's relationship to him. Sometimes he could. This was one of the days when he couldn't.

"They don't know you're his next of kin," Diana said in a hushed voice. "That -- the relationship between you and the Bennetts and WitSec -- is something that's still known to only a handful of people. The files are sealed because you were a minor, and in any case, they don't go digging into old WitSec case files when they're looking up next of kin. It looks like James's body was claimed by the nearest relative they could find -- an uncle up in Wisconsin."

He had a great-uncle, that he'd never met. Neal mulled that over.

"You could come forward," Diana said. "Have some say in what happens to him now, if you want. Meet your Wisconsin relatives."

Neal shook his head slowly. "I don't think I want to," he said, and then, though he dreaded speaking the words aloud, making them real: "What does this mean for Peter?"

Diana heaved a deep, weary sigh. "I don't have to answer that for you," she said. "We're back to square one and we don't have anywhere to go. We've just lost our chief suspect and the only witness who could clear Peter's name."

"It's going to trial, then." Neal swallowed. His throat felt thick. He'd barely touched his coffee.

Diana nodded, her eyes tired and sad. "It's going to trial."

 

***

 

Before he went back to Cyber Crimes, he stopped in the bathroom and splashed some water on his face. Looking at his face in the mirror, he found his reflection exhausted and haggard. He hadn't been able to see himself in James, but for a moment he could see an echo of James's dead features in his own face.

When he returned into Cyber Crimes and settled back at his desk, it didn't take long for Aiyana to come his way and lean a hip against the corner of the desk.

"You okay?" she asked quietly.

"I'm fine," Neal said, not meeting her eyes.

"You good to work for the rest of the day?"

"I'd really prefer that," he said. "If you don't mind."

She left him alone.

He left work on the very dot of five o'clock, and no one stopped him. When he got in the elevator, he selected not the ground floor, but 21. He caught himself bracing as the doors opened, for what, he wasn't sure. An onslaught of memory? Someone to catch him and tell him he wasn't supposed to be here? He hadn't been back to the White Collar floor since that last day, when Aiyana was assigned to be his handler.

It was painfully familiar, but not devastatingly so. For a minute or two, he just stood behind the glass doors, watching people doing end-of-workday things: finishing up reports, dumping sludgy coffee down the sink, collecting the files they meant to take home with them. Diana and Jones were still at their desks, both with their heads bent over paperwork; neither had seen him. _His_ desk had a stranger at it, a young woman with a dark ponytail. His heart twinged.

He didn't noticed Callaway until she stood up. She was in Peter's office, behind Peter's desk. _That_ was a gut-punch in the way none of the rest of it had been. He hadn't even thought to ask who was running White Collar in Peter's absence. But, of course, someone must be.

He was still trying to work up the nerve to step through the door when Diana rose from her desk, looked over and saw him. She signaled Jones. The two of them gathered up their briefcases and hustled over Neal's way. Neal stepped back and tried to look a little less like a puppy in a pet-store window, pawing at the glass.

"Twice in one day," Diana said, grinning at Jones as the two of them pushed the doors open. "This is starting to feel like old times. What are you doing out here?"

"Just having a nostalgic moment," Neal said. "It's over now." 

"Hey," Jones said, and his eyes were soft, sympathetic. "I heard about --"

"It doesn't matter," Neal said sharply. He couldn't deal with sympathy. Not for that. Not now.

He let the two of them more or less push him into the elevator, but he couldn't help looking over his shoulder. "Callaway's in charge?"

"But she's not ASAC," Jones said. "Hughes is back. I don't even want to know what went down behind the scenes. It's a pretty big step down for her."

Neal realized that he was clutching at straws, but if straws were all he had to hang onto, then hang on he would. "Was she involved, do you think? In what happened to Peter. Would she know anything?"

Diana touched her lips. Jones clammed up. Neither of them spoke until they were out on the sidewalk; then Jones said, "It's hard to say."

"Our best guess is no," Diana said. "You're not the only one who's thought about that angle, Caffrey. But we've been working with her for months. Best guess is she had friends in high places, like Hughes does; the difference is that his friends are still there and hers are gone. She's muddling through like the rest of us."

Neal thought about making a snarky remark about the FBI promoting on merit, but he didn't really have it in him. Instead he asked an honest question. "What's it like, working there now?"

"It's all right," Jones said.

"She runs a much tighter ship than Peter did," Diana put in.

Jones nodded. "Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Peter went off script a lot. I know how this is going to sound and I hate to say it, but I think the department's run better than it was when Peter was in charge."

Diana's lips tightened. Obviously this was an argument they'd had before. Neal's stomach twisted; he felt a rising surge of the anger he'd been swallowing, the same feeling he'd had before he pointed a gun at Adler, before he put on boxing gloves and went into the ring with every intention of hurting Peter. "So you're saying you like the way things are? With Peter in prison?"

"No," Jones said. "No, I'm _not_ saying that, but we're reaching a point where there's not a lot else we can do except move on. We've followed every lead. We've done everything that could be done. At some point we're going to have to accept that this is how things are. Neal, it's been _months._ "

Neal didn't speak, just shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. When Peter went to prison, the leaves had been green; now the air was sharp with winter.

He could recognize what Diana and Jones were both doing, though he suspected they didn't even recognize it themselves. You saw it a lot on the street. When your friends went to prison, you drew back, distanced yourself, pretended that you'd wanted this all along. It wasn't something people did on purpose, for the most part; it was a natural human reaction. _Don't fall when they fall. Step back. Step away._ Mozzie had done it after Neal was convicted. Neal wouldn't have expected anything else.

Diana and Jones had been hanging onto a hope that Neal now realized had been doomed from the start. James was never going to be the white knight riding in to save them all, but they'd needed to cling to that possibility, using it to ward off the dark. And now even that was gone, and they were drawing away, protecting their vulnerable places.

_My father is dead._

It didn't seem real.

He went on a few paces, then looked back as he realized the two of them had stopped.

"Hey, Caffrey," Diana said with unaccustomed gentleness. "You want a ride?"

"No," he said.

He turned his back and began the long walk uptown.

About halfway, it began to rain. He gave up and hailed a cab. He got home miserable and soaked, with his suit starting to dry on him into uncomfortable rumples.

June was downstairs, reading. She took one look at him and rose from her chair.

"It's okay," Neal said, waving her off. "I'm okay. I -- I need to get this off; I don't want to ruin one of Byron's suits."

He went up to the room and took a very long shower, until his fingertips started to prune and he told himself he couldn't stay in here forever. The world would still be there when he got out, unfortunately.

Coming out of the bathroom, toweling his hair, he stopped at the sight of a tidy plate of salmon and rice pilaf on the table, with a glass of wine beside it. June, of course. He wondered if she'd hung around for awhile, waiting for him to get out of the shower. He was glad she'd left, though, because it saved him the awkwardness of asking her to leave. He didn't want company right now, not even Mozzie.

He ate a single bite of the salmon before deciding he wasn't hungry. Instead he got out his files by habit, then stared at them as comprehension dawned. He didn't have to look for James anymore. James had been found.

He'd been found, and he wasn't going to help Peter. He couldn't.

It was possible that no one could.

 

***

 

The rain kept up all night, off and on, slicking the streets and bringing down the last of the leaves. Morning dawned gray and miserable. Neal was glad, for once, that Cyber Crimes didn't have windows.

Someone had gone and stuck up paper leaves and pumpkins in an attempt to festive up the place for the autumn and Thanksgiving season. It didn't work.

Neal tried to concentrate on case files. He kept thinking that he should feel more than he did. _My father's dead._ But he hadn't known James as anything more than a face in a photograph and, eventually, the perpetrator of a terrible crime.

 _My father is dead_ ran the refrain in his head, and his heart could answer nothing but _I don't really care. He probably got what was coming to him._

He wondered what kind of a person that made him.

"Hey," Aiyana said. She'd been trying to get his attention for some time, he realized. "You with us, Caffrey?" she asked with a half-smile.

She was wearing her coat. So were the others. Neal cut a quick sideways glance at the clock on the computer. Not quitting time. Not even noon yet.

"We going somewhere?"

Aiyana grinned. "You miss doing field work?"

Neal reached for his jacket.

 

***

 

It wasn't much of a field job, but it beat another day in the office. Neal got to do a little front-man work and then hang back and watch the takedown. It made him pleasantly nostalgic for his time in the White Collar office. Mozzie would have told him he had Stockholm syndrome.

"I think we might have a more complicated undercover assignment for you, if you want it," Aiyana said on the way back to the office. It was raining and the streets were awash. She drove slowly and carefully, one sure hand on the steering wheel, calm and steady. The driver in front of them braked suddenly; she was already anticipating it, and Neal hardly felt a tug against his seat belt. Peter would probably have been tailgating and cursing out the driver for his sudden stop.

"I would _love_ it," Neal said fervently.

"Don't you even want to know what it is?"

"If it gets me out of the office, I don't care."

Aiyana smiled her crooked smile. "You'd just be going in as a buyer for some computer equipment. We'll have to coach you through the technical stuff, since you're supposed to be setting up a pirate server bank."

"I'm good at absorbing information quickly."

"So I've heard," she said. "You like field work, don't you?"

"I like _doing_ things," Neal corrected her. "As opposed to sitting in a dark room staring at server logs. I wasn't even sure if you guys _had_ field work."

"We do. I just didn't trust _you_ in the field."

"And you do now?"

She shrugged. "I still don't know quite how to feel about you, Caffrey. But I think you can handle yourself on an assignment without double-crossing us, and that's what counts."

It shouldn't have made him feel as good as it did.

 

***

 

"They offered me a plea bargain," Peter said at their weekly visit.

"Oh?" Neal said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. 

"Prosecutor told me if I plead guilty to manslaughter, he won't push for Murder One. For manslaughter under these circumstances, we'd be looking at fifteen to twenty, probably."

"Fifteen to twenty ... years?" It was too much. He couldn't wrap his mind around it.

Peter moved his head in something like a nod. "My lawyer thinks that's the best offer we're going to get. The premeditated murder of a US Senator ... that's a capital crime, Neal."

"I know," Neal said. It was an awareness that had rarely been far from his mind. He still felt as if the world was whirling around him. _Fifteen to twenty years?_

"If we don't take the deal, it goes to trial, and I'm going to the electric chair if I lose."

"But you could win," Neal said.

"I could," Peter said quietly. "And taking the deal ... it'll mean telling them I did it." The words were forced out through jaw muscles so tight that his voice barely sounded like his own. "It would mean saying, on the record, that all my protests of innocence were just a ... a guilty man telling lies. My parents -- El's family -- El ..."

"Everyone who matters knows the truth," Neal said. He had to stop himself from reaching out to lay his hand on Peter's arm.

Peter got himself together. "I know. I know that. And it would also mean that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. That I'd know, for certain, that I'd be out in --" His voice cracked. "In a given amount of time. Something to count down to. There's no guarantee, otherwise."

Fifteen to twenty years. _My God,_ Neal thought, _he'll be seventy._ Peter's entire life, up in smoke.

"There was a time in my life," Peter said, and he spoke to a point in the air over Neal's left shoulder rather than to Neal himself, "when I'd have let to go to trial in an instant. I'm not guilty and the evidence would have to prove it, the jury would have to see it. Because that's how the system _works_ , and I know it doesn't work that way for everyone, every time -- I'm not that naive. But trusting myself, my future, to it ... I would have trusted it, once." The last words were nearly whispered; Neal had to lean forward to hear. "I don't anymore."

He seemed to crumple inside his prison-orange jumpsuit. It was a terrible admission, coming from him, and one that Neal knew he would make to very few people. The fundamental belief that justice was a goal worth fighting for, that truth and right could be made to win -- it _was_ Peter. It was a torch that he carried so strongly that he made other people around him believe in it, like a light that he shone into the dark crevices of the world around him. He'd made Neal believe in it, a little bit, for a little while.

There had been times when Neal had wanted to shake Peter and force him to see how the world really worked: that the system Peter had devoted his life to was fundamentally unfair, that it ground up good people in its teeth and spat criminals out the other end. You didn't win by playing by the rules, you just _didn't_ , and there had been times when he couldn't believe that an otherwise intelligent person like Peter could believe that you could. 

And now, now that it had finally happened ... now that Peter had lost his faith in the ideal that had once been his lighthouse, Neal wished like hell that he could find some way to put it all back.

But he'd always been better at breaking things that putting them back together.

He reached out and grasped Peter's hand. Peter clutched him back like a drowning man. The guard, by the door, made an abortive movement and then relaxed.

They didn't speak any more, just held on, until time ran out and Neal, reluctantly, got up to go. Peter was still gripping his hand, and rose with him.

"I haven't even asked how you are," Peter said.

Neal laughed, a small sad sound. "I ... don't know."

"Truth," Peter said, and his head was tipped to the side, just a little. There was this thing Peter could do where he listened to you with his whole body, and he was doing it now. "Just you, not me -- the parts of your life that have nothing to do with me, I mean. I really want to know."

"I think ... I was really unhappy for a while and now I'm not so much anymore," Neal said slowly. He was having to feel it out as he said it, and he paused for a surprised moment at the realization that he had, to some extent, been keeping _himself_ unhappy, because anything else felt like a betrayal of Peter. But that wasn't fair to him, and it wasn't fair to Peter, either. He knew that Peter didn't want that for him.

Peter was still waiting.

"I miss -- miss working with you. Cyber Crimes isn't White Collar. But -- I can see myself doing the rest of my term on the anklet there. Without going out of my mind, I mean. It's ... okay, actually."

"Behaving yourself," Peter said.

"Yes," Neal said simply, because it was all he could give now, all he had left to give Peter. So he would.

Peter's smile came slowly, like the sun breaking through the clouds. "Good," he said, and Neal had a feeling he wasn't just talking about the _behaving yourself_ part. Peter gripped his shoulder and pulled him in for a tight hug.

It felt like a goodbye.

 

***

 

But it wasn't. Not quite. Not yet.

Neal heard, second-hand, that Peter had accepted the prosecutor's offer. Which meant pleading guilty to killing Pratt. But Peter's sentencing was scheduled for a month after that, so there were still visits in the little bare room, in which they carefully talked around the giant elephant in the room and stuck to simple, neutral topics. 

Peter's confession of guilt caused a new round of the media circus, somewhat more subdued this time -- the Pratt story had already, for the most part, fallen off the radar of the main media outlets, so beyond the bare-bones reporting on CNN and the bigger New York news media, it was mostly kept alive by tabloids and blog sites. Pratt's daughter was interviewed repeatedly to express her disgust for a system that allowed her father's killer to accept a plea bargain. "Burke, that monster, might be out on the street in a few years. My father is gone forever. That's not justice."

Ironically Neal thought he might have agreed with her in another context; it really _wouldn't_ have been right, if he hadn't known that Peter was innocent. 

And he found it was increasingly easy to wonder about that. There was absolutely no evidence that Peter _hadn't_ killed Pratt. No witnesses, no way ever to prove or disprove it, now that James was ... now that James ...

Maybe Peter really had done it. Maybe it had been an accident; maybe his protestations of innocence were just ... justifications, after the fact.

He knew Peter. He knew Peter wouldn't do that. Except ... how well did you really ever know anybody?

One afternoon in the Cyber Crimes office, he happened to look up and notice Lake browsing a site with Peter's mug shot at the top. There was a monitor in the way; neither of them seemed to be aware that Neal was in earshot.

"People like Burke make me sick," Lake said to Cudahy. "It's just so hard to believe, you know -- someone we knew, worked with on joint exercises, that kind of thing. _Burke._ He's like the whole department's number one straight arrow. I really thought it was a frame-up."

"I never would have guessed," Cudahy said. "What makes an agent go bad?"

"I hope they lock him up and throw away the key," Lake muttered.

Neal realized that his hand had closed into a fist. He opened it quietly. _Don't get involved,_ he told himself. What could he say in Peter's defense? Peter had confessed to Pratt's murder. The water-cooler talk all around the building was probably similar -- Peter would certainly have defenders (he'd been here too long, and made too many friends, not to have people speaking up for him) but the ranks of law enforcement would be closing against him. Cops didn't like dirty cops.

How well Neal knew that. He'd just never, ever, not in a million years guessed that Peter might someday be counted in that group.

 _Let go,_ he told himself. _Let go, release it, move on._ Peter had made his choice. Neal had to do likewise. A younger version of himself wouldn't have had the self-control to keep his mouth shut, but, older and a little wiser, he knew there was nothing to gain from it now. Peter was a dirty cop, officially if not in reality, and Neal had to separate himself as much as possible if he was going to avoid that taint. He'd worked with Peter for years, after all. The stigma would hover over him as well unless he took those necessary steps away, as everyone else in the building was doing.

That was how the game was played.

He looked up and Aiyana was standing by his desk. "I'm running out to look into a physical security breach at a server bank in the Village," she said. "Your area. Want to take a look?"

Neal reached for his coat.

A slushy mix of rain and snow was falling outside. There had been a time in his life when he never had to see winter if he didn't want to. Like a migrating bird he'd followed the summer to Mediterranean beaches and Caribbean cruise ships.

 _I could run now,_ he thought, and it was suddenly, wildly tempting. At this point it wasn't like he could do Peter that much harm if he left. And Peter wouldn't be able to come after him. Peter had brought him home in chains from Cape Verde, but Peter couldn't catch him if Peter was in prison.

On the other hand, running now might make things go much worse at Peter's sentencing. He didn't really want to be responsible for Peter getting thirty years instead of ten.

Maybe he'd wait until after the sentencing. It would still be winter then, after all.

"I heard Dave and Travis today," Aiyana said as they walked to her car. "I know it bothers you, but you're going to have to let it go. It's nothing you won't hear throughout the building."

"I know, but ..." Somehow it seemed like the final insult, worse even than the threat of a lengthy prison sentence. Peter's integrity had always meant the world to him. It _was_ him. And now everyone he worked with knew he'd confessed to murder. Even if he could somehow duck prison, he couldn't come back here.

And still there were those lingering doubts ...

"Aiyana," Neal said as they drove through rainy streets. "What do you think are the odds that Peter actually did it?"

He glanced sideways at her. He couldn't read her face, and she drove in silence for a minute or two before she said, "I was wondering how long it would take _you_ to start wondering that."

"He said he didn't," Neal said, and now that he'd said it out loud, it seemed hopelessly, childishly naive. Of _course_ Peter was going to say he hadn't, when he was facing a possible death penalty. Neal of all people should know how easy it was for people to lie.

_Peter wouldn't._

_How do you know? You trusted James, too._

"At this point, it doesn't matter what I think," Aiyana said. "He took the plea bargain. That's what matters."

Neal had never realized how much he'd relied on his faith in Peter's integrity. Never realized how much comfort came from knowing that Peter was there, even if it was at a distance. Now he felt adrift. Peter would be sentenced and imprisoned, and Neal wasn't even sure if Peter was telling the truth about the shooting anymore. Maybe prison was where Peter ought to be.

"I'm not sure what to do," Neal admitted in a small voice. "I don't know where to go from here."

"Just keep moving forward," Aiyana said after a pause. "It's all you can do, I guess. Let the past stay in the past, and just keep moving forward, or you'll fall."

 

***

 

More days went by. There were calls from attorneys. Neal was interviewed, somewhat to his own surprise (and worry). He tried to put the best possible spin on his time with Peter without actually lying, and he tried to make sure that his answers always came back around to Peter being a fine upstanding citizen, devoted to law and order, always doing his best to uphold justice. Whether Neal himself believed it or not, the important thing was convincing the judge.

From what he heard, El had been interviewed too, and Hughes, and basically everyone who knew Peter, at least anyone who was in a position to offer a character reference. Neal found himself wondering, for the first time, if this had been done for him. If so, Peter had certainly been one of the people they'd talked to. He wondered what Peter had said.

"The judge has quite a bit of discretion at the sentencing, you know," June pointed out. "And there are also appeals, if it doesn't go well." Naturally she was intimately familiar with this side of things.

When the day of Peter's sentencing finally arrived, Neal didn't attend; he went in to work like a normal workday. He knew Elizabeth would be there, and Peter's parents, and a lot of Peter's friends from the FBI. He had a strong feeling that the ex-con who'd set the whole thing into motion would not be welcome at a gathering like that. And Peter couldn't possibly appreciate having that kind of reminder. The best thing Neal could do for everyone was just stay away.

Still, he was distracted and careless. He kept having to fill out forms multiple times because he'd put something in wrong. He dropped things.

It was past lunchtime -- they'd ordered in -- when Aiyana beckoned him into a conference room. His stomach in knots, Neal followed her and sat where she gestured him to sit.

"Talked to a friend of mine at the courthouse," Aiyana said. "Burke's sentencing is done. I thought you'd want to know how it turned out."

Neal tightened his hands into fists on his knees; he said nothing.

"He got ten years."

Neal's breath caught, and caught hard. Ten years. Peter would be sixty when he got out. 

Ten years. Still, that was bad but not as bad as it could have been. In fact, it was very far from as bad as it could have been. He might get parole sooner for good behavior; he was Peter, after all.

 _Ten years. We can deal with that._ All Peter would have to do was stay away from the inevitable segment of GenPop that had it in for him. It might mean ten years in solitary -- no, don't think about that. Peter wasn't the first law enforcement agent ever to go to prison. Others had survived before him.

Neal tried not to think about one of the things he'd learned about the prison pecking order during his own four years: guards and inmates alike hated crooked cops.

He realized that he was just sitting there with Aiyana looking at him, her gaze sympathetic. Somehow he mustered a smile from some reservoir deep within him. "Thank you," he said politely. "Can I go back to work now?"

Her sympathetic expression caught as if on a hook. "Yes. Of course."

He went.

The workday dragged, but it crawled eventually to its inevitable conclusion. Aiyana joined him in the elevator.

"I thought you might want a ride," she said. "Or -- someone to talk to."

Neal looked at her carefully. "We don't really have that kind of a relationship, you and me."

"I know that." Her smile was a quick little tug. "And that's on me in some ways, Neal. When the higher-ups throw you a shit assignment, you keep your head down and struggle through it, trying not to make any more waves than you have to. Don't tell me you haven't been doing the exact same thing."

Neal shrugged. "I'm a shit assignment?" he said, but it didn't come out bitter.

"I think they meant it to be," Aiyana said bluntly. "Don't you? Let's take the con who torpedoed one good agent's career and stick him together with the agent they kind of wish would take early retirement or move to a different agency. And I -- I don't know. I saw what had happened to Burke."

"And didn't want it to happen to you," Neal said. "I get that."

"Well, it's not just that," Aiyana said. "I wasn't sure what to think about you at first. Here's a con working with the FBI -- how's _that_ supposed to work out? Tell you the truth, I thought Burke was crazy to agree to it in the first place."

"You're not the only one."

"I know. But ..." She glanced at him. "You've done good work with us these last few months, Neal. I know it's slow, detail-oriented work compared to what you're used to, but our conviction rate is way up. You're good at this. I'm sorry things worked out the way they did with Burke."

"Me too," Neal said, his throat tight.

"Anyway, I don't have any plans this evening. My ex has the kids. Do you want to get something to eat, maybe go out somewhere?"

"Actually, if you're offering ..." He took a deep breath. "I'd like to drive down to Brooklyn and see Elizabeth."

Aiyana looked at him calmly, and then said, "Sure."

They drove in peaceful silence through the winter-wet city. Aiyana made occasional small talk, and it was companionable. Sometimes, when things were quiet and Neal didn't look over, he could almost imagine it was Peter at the wheel. Except for Aiyana's more placid driving style. He was almost getting used to the lack of tailgating or sudden, terrifying lane changes.

He didn't have to direct her to the Burkes' townhouse. There were no open parking spaces and she slowed. "I'm guessing you don't want me to come in."

"It's not you," Neal said. 

"I know. How long are you going to be?"

"Not long, I expect. Maybe swing back around to pick me up in a few minutes."

Aiyana nodded and double-parked long enough to let him out.

Neal mounted the steps to the Burkes' front door. It was familiar and yet not, like trying to put back on a skin he'd outgrown. He knocked.

Elizabeth answered the door. Her eyes were shadowed and tired, but she didn't look broken or desperately unhappy. Just worn down. Neal was half expecting to be thrown out, but instead she said, "Come on in. Do you want anything? Coffee?"

"No, I wasn't going to stay long --" He stopped short at the sight of the living room, awash in boxes. The bookshelves were half stripped; some of the pictures had been taken down from the walls. "What's going on?"

"Oh," Elizabeth said. "It's -- they're sending Peter to a prison in Illinois."

"What?" Neal asked blankly. He'd known that Peter would be out of his radius after the sentencing, but he'd thought it wouldn't be too far away. Close enough that he could occasionally talk Aiyana or one of the other agents into taking him to visit.

"They thought ... sorry. Excuse me." Elizabeth dashed at her eyes. "They thought incarcerating him out of state would make it less likely that he'd encounter anyone he knew in prison, you know, anyone he'd put away. They let us have some input into the process; it wasn't a sure thing, but we suggested Illinois because my parents are there. We were both surprised they said yes."

"When are they ..."

"They're transferring him in the morning."

Neal's legs wobbled; he leaned against the end of the couch. "Oh," he said, stunned. He hadn't had a chance to say goodbye. And he wouldn't; visiting hours were done for the day. He wouldn't, ever.

"I'll be flying out in a few days to start looking for a place to stay. I guess it'll probably take awhile to get our stuff all shipped or stored, and sell the townhouse, but -- we have nothing but time, right?"

Elizabeth seemed to wind down and just stood there, her hands hanging down, helpless.

Neal wasn't sure if she'd welcome it from him right now, but he closed the space between them and wrapped his arms around her. She held herself stiff for a moment, then her head sagged against his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," Neal said into her hair.

"Don't," Elizabeth said sharply, and then more softly: "Don't, please. Just ... this is nice. I like this. Keep doing this."

Neal laughed against her hair, a little helpless and perhaps a little manic. Then he kept holding her, and she brought her arms up and held him too.

The sound of a toilet flushing upstairs made Neal jump. He hadn't expected anyone else in the house. 

"Oh," Elizabeth said, drawing away. She brushed at her hair, trying to arrange it. "My parents are here. They flew in last night. I -- do you want to stay for a cup of coffee? I don't mean to be a terrible host --"

"No, I understand." It was obvious that she was busy and stressed, trying to deal with houseguests and moving. "I just wanted to see you. If there's anything, anything at all I can do, just call me."

"Okay," she said, smiling. He didn't think she would.

When he left, Neal took a long look over his shoulder. Elizabeth had already gone back to pulling books off the shelves and putting them in boxes. 

He thought this might be the last time he'd see her -- certainly the last time he'd see the house in Brooklyn. He tried to drink it all in, a final memory of this place that, for a little while, had been one of his warm places.

And then he walked away.

Because that's what you do.

 

***

 

The first card came to June's a week and a half later. It was a small plain envelope and the return address was Stateville Correctional Center, Joliet, Illinois.

Neal slit the flap with a breathless feeling of anticipation. The card was simple and unadorned, with a generic picture of fall leaves. In Peter's oh-so-familiar handwriting, it read:

_Is that offer to be prison pen pals still open?_

_At the very least I owe you some birthday cards with a prison postmark._

"Damn it, Peter," Neal muttered. He sank down at the kitchen table and covered his face with his hand until the urge to laugh or cry, or do both at once, started to fade somewhat.

Then he went to find a sheet of heavy paper. With pen and ink he began a careful drawing of the Brooklyn townhouse, executed from memory. Maybe he could get Aiyana to drive him down there to check the details against his recollections.

He propped up the card on the table, where he could see it while he drew.

As he sketched the house -- adding the tiniest hint of what might be someone in the window, or maybe two people, side by side -- he told himself it was just his imagination that he could feel the slenderest of threads unspooling from him to that card and all the way down the line to far-off Illinois. With the anklet holding him to Manhattan, it was so far beyond his reach that it might as well be on the moon. But there were letters, and phone calls, and email.

He'd thought that four years in prison had taught him all there was to know about hope and waiting. He'd never realized that he still had so much to learn -- about that, and about forgiveness and faith, too. 

And in a little less than a year the anklet would come off, and who knew what could happen then? Mozzie would probably be all over the idea of a prison break. Neal doubted he could get Peter and Elizabeth to go for it, but it would be fun to plan one anyway. Just out of pure intellectual curiosity, of course.

 

***

 

"You're smiling," Aiyana remarked at work the next day.

"Am I?" Neal said. And he went back to sorting printouts of their latest suspect's downloads for the profile they were putting together.

When he went to lunch he noticed the gray clouds had parted: it was still dark and blue-tinged on the horizon, but Manhattan was bathed in light, the buildings framed in gold against the darkened sky. Neal had noticed on his way to work that the trees in the park were starting to bud. It looked like it was going to be an early spring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it. I still have ambivalent feelings about this fic, but there was simply too much of it _not_ to post.
> 
> It's interesting to me, looking back on the parts of this I wrote before season five aired, that I was expecting Peter and Elizabeth to blame Neal for Peter being framed. It was a little surprising (though gratifying) to me in canon that they weren't angry at all; I was braced for everyone to be a lot worse to each other.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that my original plans for this fic included more of Neal and Aiyana working together in the field and getting to know each other, emphasizing her Peter-like emotional qualities. However, that's the part that wasn't written (I had the beginning and end and 90% of the middle) and I couldn't remember what, if anything, I'd had in mind for it, so I went with what was already there.
> 
> IMHO, Neal actually gets a happier ending in this fic than he does in canon -- well, except for having to work at Cyber Crimes for the next year. Though of course it's possible that he gives up on it, cuts his anklet, and takes off for a tropical island after one cyberhacking case too many.
> 
> When I was originally writing this fic, I wrote two endings. In the other (unused) ending, Neal throws away Peter's card instead of answering it; he decides to take advantage of the opportunity he's been offered to make a fresh start. When it came time to post the fic, I dithered over the two endings, but decided to go with this one. I don't have a good justification for it (actually, after the series finale I think the other one is probably more in character), but imagining Peter sending letter after letter from prison that Neal would never read or answer was too impossibly sad; I couldn't deal. ;__;


End file.
